Heads of the Colored People

by Nafissa Thompson-Spires

  • • •

  At a quarter to five, she put on her headset with the 3-D microphone and called Dom.

  “Hey, sorry, I was finishing something up,” his torso said.

  “Hey,” Raina said, too loudly before correcting herself. “Hey,” she half whispered, half spoke. Dom preferred her onscreen persona—no head—and she tolerated his requests for faceless chatting, though she occasionally got a glimpse of his neck or the faint dark scruff on his pale, almost translucent, chin. “What did you think?”

  “Hmm, it was good,” Dom said after a hesitation. “The story part was. Rapunzel was a nice choice, but if you’re gonna do something like that, I think you should show more of your hair next time.”

  Raina was trying to transition her hair from relaxed to natural, though she kept it flat-ironed in most of her videos. She tried scrunching the burned-straight ends to blend them with the three to four inches of ingrowing coils and kinks at her hairline. But that made her hair only chin length instead of shoulder length, and Dom speculated that her views decreased when her hair was not in the frame or the thumbnail preview for the video.

  They had met—really, started chatting, first through text and then on camera—after he commented on a few of her videos. She only had fifty-seven subscribers then, but with Dom’s suggestions, little things, like telling stories on camera or changing the video tags, she had grown her brand to over twenty thousand subscribers in a little over five months, even making some advertising revenue.

  “Okay, more hair,” Raina whispered. “Anything else?”

  “Meh, I like the whole fairy-tale theme. I think more videos like that, especially if you dressed up.”

  “Like a corset?”

  “Yeah, something like that.” She thought she heard Dom chewing something.

  “I’ll think about it,” Raina said, her mind already working out the details of her mother’s reproof. Costumes were especially offensive to Carmen and more evidence of impropriety or kink, not simply roleplaying or fantasy. In her regular voice, Raina said, “Dom, have you thought about what I said, about the next level?”

  Dom shifted in his chair, his white hands fluttering toward the top of the screen and out of the frame, probably running through his hair. He was definitely chewing. “I just think it might change things, like, too much,” he said, after a long pause. “I like things the way they are now.”

  “I do, too,” Raina said, slowly, back in her gentle-whisper voice, “but if you’re really my boyfriend, it would make more sense to actually see each other, or at least more of each other.”

  “I’ll think about it,” he said. “My dad’s texting me, gotta go. I’ll call or something tonight.” Raina didn’t hear his phone buzzing, but she said bye.

  • • •

  Knowing her mother would not be home for another two hours at least, Raina checked the comments.

  Earthworm366: Dude, you seriously just gave me a brain orgasm. Didn’t now that was possible

  168 thumbs up

  AnimeAniME: Comment hidden due to low rating. Show Comment:

  U gave me an actual orgasm

  147 thumbs down

  RhiRhi#1Fan: RIANWHISPER YOU NEED TO GET ON HERE AND AND MAKE SOME MORE VIDEOS SO I CAN SLEEP. U HAVE THE BEST TRIGGERS!! ALL TINGLES ALL THE TIME

  37 thumbs up

  NiceGirlFinishFirstorSecond: love this. one request: can you make a roleplaying vid about rolling cigars???

  12 thumbs up

  Lalalalalaland: Why is it that this video is most popular with men and boys ages 18–64? SMH. Just saying.

  80 thumbs up

  She appreciated the positive feedback, but sometimes Raina felt, briefly, that everyone wanted or saw only a piece of her, not a whole, that she was mere flesh, a series of keywords to help identify her:

  ASMR whispers rain tingles black African American African-American full thick DDs long-hair-don’t-care natural curly massage soft spoken binaural bob ross water sounds storytelling hair brushing gentle role play adenoids spa day fairy tales tapping mind massage autonomous sensory meridian response breasts cleavage

  As she deleted one of the latest offensive comments, which were fewer and farther between this round, her eyes found another post, clearly from Kevin or one of his sidekicks, maybe Adam or Michael.

  SmexyandIKnowIt: I want it you got it lemme get it come on wit it Raina.

  This one was probably Michael’s work; his punctuation was always the worst of the three guys, even though he sat three seats to the left of Raina in AP English now. Kevin was their leader of sorts. He had been nicer in elementary school, though his mean edge was present if you crossed him. Raina almost liked him then, admiring his short brown hair and the way his green eyes contrasted with his tan. But around sixth grade, he became really mean to a lot of the girls, not just Raina, though he often made comments about the size of her chest. It was only when he tried to feel her up on a class trip to Catalina that they became enemies. She had pushed him into a row of kayaks, causing him to knock them over. Crying, she ran off; he told his friends—and subsequently the entire class—that Raina was a slut who had flashed him her boobs.

  She hadn’t felt safe around him since. Occasionally, he caught her when she was isolated, after school or near her locker. Once, a month ago, he whispered some of the things he would do to her, that first he was going to grab her breasts and then cut one of them off. Raina hadn’t told anyone at first. It would be her word against his, just as it had been the time she told her mother and the principal about the incident in Catalina. Her mother had said she wanted to “deal with this situation,” but she also asked Raina, “Did you do anything to make him think he could touch you like that? Did you give him any ideas?” Carmen wouldn’t understand these whispers any more than she understood why Raina wanted to leave Dorsey. And anyway, Kevin didn’t put any actual threats in writing. She had no proof—with his many avatars and handles—that any of the online harassment even came from Kevin or whether Kevin would act on anything he said. But sometimes she wondered if the stress of the ongoing, implied danger might be just as harmful. It was the idea of the idea of Kevin that kept Raina anxious.

  She blocked SmexyandIKnowIt before looking at the recent uploads from other ASMR channels. Raina was one of only a handful of black ASMR providers, and so far only one other black girl had more subscribers than she, but that girl was older and had been making videos longer. Raina hoped to compete with the nonblack majority of ASMR makers, some of whom had hundreds of thousands of followers and videos with millions of views. If she counted her previous two YouTube names, she had a total of three million views—though at least a thousand of those were probably from Carmen. Under her current name, Rainwhispers, Raina’s most-watched video was at nearly 900,000. Her income from the videos meant she could bypass her father and buy herself the 3-D headset she used with Dom and in her videos, but she didn’t make big purchases often.

  Her mother never relented in her disapproval of the means, but she approved of Raina’s profits and agreed that a money market account would help Raina secure her future, without having to depend on a man, even her father. “All of this, this lifestyle, isn’t just from the divorce settlement,” Carmen reminded Raina regularly, pointing around the house. “I was on the payroll. Always make sure you’re on the payroll.” She wondered if her mother knew that it wasn’t her father’s money that burdened her, but the way her mother showed it—Dorsey, the Town Car, endless luncheons and benefits. Raina vowed to send her own kids to public school, somewhere where they’d never be the only one of anything, and to create as safe and nurturing an environment as she could.

  • • •

  Carmen blew in through the house around seven, her hands full of large brown-and-white paper bags with twine handles. She filled the room, despite her thin frame. “Did you eat?” she asked Raina, who was seated at the kitchen island, half watching a reality show and half thinking about what Dom said.

  “Just finis
hed one chicken breast and the Brussels sprouts you left.” Raina sighed. She was still hungry and planning on raiding the freezer for whatever stevia-sweetened sorbet or other low-carb snacks she could find once her mother was out of the room.

  “Good. The family commercial is coming up in two weeks, don’t forget.”

  “I know, you’ve told me three times and left a note.”

  “I never know if you read them or just throw them away,” Carmen said, smoothing one of her brown bags off the counter. “I picked a few things out for you. How was your day, by the way?”

  Raina shrugged. She debated telling her mother about Kevin, again, but instead said, “Fine. We had a sub in English today, so I got my homework done during class. The video is doing pretty well so far.”

  “Hmm,” Carmen said, her lips pinched together as she rifled through the shopping bags. “I wish you had left out the boob shot, but the story was cute. I’m thinking this blue one is the best dress for the commercial; your father will be in blue, though I’ll probably wear gray or green—I haven’t decided.”

  “It looks too small,” Raina said, getting up to feel the fabric of a navy blue A-line dress with a narrow rhinestone belt attached to the waist. “It’s a 10/12,” she said louder than she had planned, though she could never control her voice with Carmen. “I’m a fourteen. You know that.”

  “Yes, but you have two weeks,” Carmen said, smiling a little and pointing to another bag. “They’re all twelves. At least look at them. I spent an hour of my day looking for pieces that would be flattering.”

  “I’m supposed to be calling Dom soon,” Raina said, and left for her bedroom.

  • • •

  Raina sat on her bed, turned on her television, and considered using her trump card—“I can go stay with Dad, then”—but this battle didn’t seem worth it, at least not yet. Maybe if Carmen pushed again about Raina getting the edges of her hair touched up, Raina might invoke the idle but still-useful threat. Her dad didn’t exactly approve of the videos either, but he said they weren’t harming anything as long as she kept them clean. She wasn’t sure if he had seen many of them, but when she opened the money market account, he joked, via text message, that Raina was a budding young businesswoman after his own heart and that maybe he’d let her write and direct one of his commercials eventually. He never followed through, even after Raina presented him with a script. “That’s so cute, honey,” he had emailed. “But we have a professional guy who does that. Love you. Listen to your mother ;)” She emailed him less frequently after that.

  Raina hated posing for the commercials. She hunched awkward and chubby against her mother’s tall thinness and blended into her father’s roundness, their features melding together while Carmen’s jutted, smug or confident. Raina inherited her father’s bug eyes. “Sad she takes after him,” she’d overheard a tipsy aunt say once at a holiday party.

  The biannual commercials for her father’s car dealerships stopped being cool after about first grade, when she transferred to Dorsey, where the kids of CEOs were not impressed. She tried to laugh it off when Kylie S. and even Megan and Liz, her two friends, joked about the silly slogan her father insisted on. In homage to a DMX song fluffed and smoothed out into R&B, her father sang, “What’s our name? Tyson Family Motors. If you want it, we got it, our cars are with it. Come on.” The original song came out several years before Raina was born, when they still lived in the foothills of Rancho Cucamonga, and her father, fresh out of undergrad, had inherited and rebranded his parents’ dealership, turning one location into four and beginning her family’s ascent—really their move west—from one house in the Inland Empire to one in Westwood and a vacation condo in Aspen. They didn’t ski; it was pure status symbol, that house. Her father lived in Woodland Hills, about thirty minutes away from Raina, with his girlfriend, Manda, a blond twentysomething who basically treated Raina the same way Carmen did; only she thought Raina’s hair “looked so cute that way, with all those little curls.” Raina saw them about six times a year, plus the two commercial shoots, which her mother still participated in four years after the divorce, because she and Raina’s father both agreed that “the family brand is different from the family.”

  Scenes from the family brand: Manda standing with a plastered smile, off to the side, off camera; a montage of Raina, Carmen, and Carl Tyson huddled together at the intersection of each dealership and each of her father’s billboards; a family existent only in cuts; her dad making promises in a voice-over; the theme song playing over their poses.

  • • •

  Dom didn’t answer when she tried to call him for a video chat, but he texted five minutes later that he would call in an hour.

  “How do you know this Dom guy is even a real person?” her friends had asked, sounding exactly like Carmen, for a change. “Haven’t you seen Catfish?”

  Raina knew Dom was real and close to her age, though once he had said seventeen and once he had said fifteen. They had never hung out in person—Dom lived in Connecticut—but she had seen his whole face early on in live video chats, when they used to talk like normal people. It was only after her popularity increased that he started asking her to make it “more like an ASMR video,” quiet and without her face. She would wait another day or so before she asked him again about chatting the old way. Anyway, he was supposed come out to California for a summer program, only five months away, he said; at very worst, they’d see each other then.

  Carmen knocked on her door and opened it without Raina’s consent. “I’m sorry about the twelves, Rain. How about we take you to my Pilates class tomorrow, so you’ll feel more confident, lengthen out a little? We can go shopping at the end of the week and you can pick something you like, fourteen, twelve, whatever.”

  Raina sighed. “I don’t want to go shopping, Mom.”

  “You have to wear something,” Carmen started. She sat on Raina’s bed. Up close, Carmen’s skin was smooth and poreless, nearly as young as Raina’s but for a few skin tags. “What is it, Rain?” she said, her voice nearly affectionate, her hand hovering as though it might touch her daughter’s shoulder. “You never talk to me anymore.”

  Raina’s mind browsed the possible answers to this tone-deaf statement: That’s because you’re never home; you don’t listen anyway; maybe because everything you say is a lecture; maybe because you care more about how I look than how I feel; I think Kevin’s posting anonymously on my page, sexually harassing me, again, and what will you even do about it?

  “We can go shopping, but I’m not going to Pilates. Can you leave? I need to call Dom,” she lied.

  Carmen left with a small huff, mumbling under her breath about teenage moodiness and ingratitude and what would have happened to her if she had used Raina’s tone of voice with her mother.

  Raina scrolled through her new comments, another one from Kevin. There were still forty-five minutes left before Dom was supposed to call, forty-five minutes to compose herself and fix her voice into something pleasant, order the details of her life so that only the prettiest parts showed.

  On days like this, Raina sometimes fantasized about running away, saving her money, taking her equipment, and finding a community of people who would really see her, not the family brand, not the extra thirty pounds, not the untouched edges of her hair or her Web tags, but her, whoever she was, her whole head and body fitting into a frame of her own design. But she knew this community didn’t likely exist, and Carmen said that runaways only ended up with human traffickers. She could tolerate Carmen and Dorsey for a few more years until college, couldn’t she? But what then? She wanted to think of college as an opportunity for new freedoms, self-expression, rebellion. She would grow her hair out into naps if she pleased and do what she wanted with her body. But what if college was only thirteenth grade, an escalation of everything in her life now, with older, more taxing versions of the same people, where she’d exchange Carmen and Kevin for new avatars—a controlling sorority sister or an inappropriate professor?<
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  • • •

  RAINA STARTED OUTLINING a new video. She usually wrote a script and storyboard first and improvised her monologue once she began filming, sometimes taking three days for a single concept. She sat in front of the camera, with her 3-D microphone nearby, but she quickly abandoned her notes. With her whole head in the frame, she spoke in her natural voice, softened so that Carmen would not hear her. “Today, I’m not going to tell you a fairy tale, but something I’ve been thinking about, about myself,” she began. “I struggle with a lot of things,” she said. “Sometimes, I think I’m beautiful and smart, but then one little thing knocks me down, and I don’t know who I am. I can’t be the only one who feels this way.” She paused. She might have been crying; her voice, sharp and cracking, would not modulate. “I’m tired of faking this whispery voice and doing everything for everyone else and worrying about how I look and if anyone’s going to intimidate or abuse me and telling other people’s fantasy stories. I want to stop being afraid to tell the truth. I want to say, ‘Screw everyone who thinks they can just treat me any kind of way, even my mom and boyfriend.’ But would you even hear me?” She persisted until she felt spent, emptied as though after a deep purge. Her exhilaration at the thought of publishing this video made Raina feel slightly breathless. Her cursor hovered over the Upload button.

  The laptop rang—Dom calling for a video chat—just as Carmen knocked and barged into the room again. “Raina, what is it? You’ve been crying. I could hear you from my room. Talk to me, honey. What is it?”

  Raina didn’t look up at Carmen or pause to decline Dom’s call. With the laptop still ringing and Carmen still talking, she canceled the upload and deleted the footage. She could start over later, returning to her fairy tales. Editing was the easiest part anyway; she worked best in short frames, quiet slivers, fragments. Everyone said so.