Mixed: My Life in Black and White (11 page)

I stuck to my original plan of waiting ten minutes before leaving school. One day, Christina and Tascha decided to wait for me underground. I tensed up as they approached me. Christina ripped my schoolbag from my back and threw it on the train tracks.

Tascha grabbed my arm and tried to swing me onto the tracks. I grabbed her, and in a violent tango, she ripped my shirt and I grabbed her hair. The other girls cheered Tascha on.

Several adults were watching. I hoped someone would jump in, but each time I caught someone’s eye, they looked away.

I slammed my heel down on Tascha’s sneaker. The pain of my cheap plastic heel on her Reeboks caused her to let go of me.

“What did I ever do to you?” I yelled, panting for air.

Christina pulled on Tascha’s arm. “Leave her alone. She ain’t worth getting expelled for.”

I couldn’t believe the same girls who had almost murdered me were actually worried about their academic careers. Thank God I have gifted school bullies, I thought.

“Stuck-up yellow bitch,” another member of the crew yelled at me before they all walked to the other end of the platform. When the train arrived, I saw my book bag get blown to pieces. I folded my arms against my chest to cover up the hole in my shirt and got on the train.

When I arrived home, Pam was mad at me for losing my books. When she had me pick the seeds out of her marijuana bag that night, I saved some to show my mother. I cried as I handed them over later.

“Those are Pam’s seeds,” I said, and started crying.

“Oh, my goodness, I’m so sorry,” my mother said. “No wonder all of my clothes smell like Black Love incense! I’ll get rid of her, you don’t have to cry.”

“Please don’t hire any more Real Black People! I hate black people!” I screamed, before running and locking myself in my room.

I didn’t want to have a mother-daughter mulatto moment like the ones we had after the zebra teasings and the your-dad-isn’twhite scuffles. I didn’t want another race lesson or an analysis of how crazy everyone else was and how special I was. I wanted out of the race game. It seemed every time I learned the rules, someone changed them on me. I was tired of fighting. I wanted to be a purebred.

I grabbed my seventh-grade yearbook and studied the photos. Unlike my previous schools, there were a few people who had both my complexion and skin color: María, José, Blanca. I went to the mirror armed with two months of junior high Spanish and practiced my new identity.

“Mixed? No,” I said, a frown on my face. “ Yo soy puertorriqueña!” I said, and smiled.

Yellow Cab

With beauty, charm, sweetness of personality, the “correct” color and now an inheritance to boot, my mother had many suitors.

—Shirlee Taylor Haizlip,
The Sweeter the Juice: A Family Memoir in Black and White

Dear [insert rapper’s name here]:

My name is Angela a.k.a. Lady A. I go to a gifted school
and I love your rhymes. My dream is to get a recording
contract and hear myself on the radio just like you. I have
a beef with some girls at school because I’m light-skinned,
but like you say in your rap: [insert verse about outdoing
the competition], so I ain’t even worried about it. Anyway,
if you have time, could you come to my school and give a
concert? My contact information is below.

I sent out at least one hundred of these letters. (God, I
needed some friends!) The only time I deviated from that rapper form letter was when I had a massive crush on Cockroach (Theo’s best friend) from
The Cosby Show
and wrote him a three-page letter complete with stickers. With the rappers, I honestly thought one was going to read my letter, blast into my junior high auditorium, grab the microphone, and be like, “Hey, Christina! Bullying is wack, so step back!” (or something like that).

Hell, it was 1988, so it could have happened. In ’88 emcees were rapping about all kinds of topics, very few of them gun-related. The most popular song on the air was “Picking Boogers,” where the most offensive verse detailed how the rapper snuck “a little green one” into another rapper’s spaghetti.

There wasn’t a rap I didn’t know, and that was a huge feat, because even though hip-hop was played for only two hours every night (it was considered street kiddie music, so even the black stations marketed themselves as having “rap-free workdays!”), there were hundreds of rappers. Every time someone came out with a hit song or group idea, someone else would come out with a follow-up. “Roxanne Roxanne” by UTFO had more than a hundred response records. The Fat Boys came out, and soon there was a group called the Skinny Boys. Run-D.M.C. came out with “My Adidas,” and another group came out with “My Fila.” You’d hear a song on the radio and it would sound like the guy from down the block, and it would turn out to
be
the guy from down the block. If you were a city kid in the eighties, you can understand why I felt I had a good chance of a rapper responding and personalizing an antibully rap for me.

Still, I wasn’t going to sit around and wait for Biz Markie to show up at my school. I continued taping the rap show every single night, using other songs’ beats to write my own rhymes. I’d use my curling iron as a microphone. I’d imagine all my bullies begging to get into my concert.

Two weeks into the summer of 1988, my hip-hop addiction gave me answers that no adult had. My bullies hate light-skinned girls because the boys love us!

Seriously, if you were a light-skinned girl in an all-black community, 1988 was a banner year for high self-esteem. The next time you encounter a thirty-something light-skinned woman with her head in the air, ask her what year her nose got stuck there. After she looks you up and down and inquires about the type of car you’re driving, she’ll undoubtedly reply, “Why, 1988, of course, the year of Light Power.”

Forget being Puerto Rican, I thought. Because of rap, you’ll finally be popular!

I made a mix tape of high-yellow hits. It started off with J.J. Fad rapping about being “light-skinned and devastating” and ended with Big Daddy Kane’s declaration of love to women who looked like me.

MTV Raps premiered that year, and I watched with pride. The majority of the women in the videos had my complexion.

Dear God, I prayed, thank you for getting me out of the white neighborhood. I may have been ugly to them, but to black people, being light is almost as good as being white! Why didn’t my mother tell me that when I cried about being next to last on the ugly list at Catholic school? Did she hate me, too? I wondered. Probably. Why else would my curfew still be when the streetlights come on?
I’m almost grown! I’m thirteen! I wear a bigger bra than she does!
She’s probably jealous of that, too.

I changed my rap name from Lady A to Big Red, as in Big Red-bone, the nickname boys called light-skinned girls, even though no one knew what it meant. I’d rap
I’m light-skinned and devastatin’/
all your men I will be takin’
into my curling iron. I’d pretend I was the only girl member of a rap crew. “She’s light-skinned and devastating,” my imaginary posse would chorus before posing in a b-boy stance as spotlights shone down and lit up my fly melanin-deficient self.

Being confident that I was in style like Adidas sneakers and Spuds MacKenzie, I was ready to take my new self-esteem show on the road. When I rode the bus in the morning, I now held boys’ gazes instead of acting like I was fascinated by the above-seat ads. Most boys reacted to my attention by smiling and motioning me over with their index fingers. I’d mimic what the older girls did; I’d shake my head
no
and make the boys come to me.

Finding out that I was pretty was like being a starving dog and getting locked in a meat factory. I went crazy feeding my appetite. There were approximately 200,000 black boys in Philadelphia between the ages of thirteen and eighteen, and I tried to collect the whole set. I stacked up boyfriends like a cheerleading pyramid. There was Allen with the inverted widow’s peak and the gigantic collection of baseball caps to cover it up. And William, who sometimes smelled like cat but he could draw his ass off and proclaimed his love for me in big graffiti bubble letters on the side of a pizza parlor wall: Will ♥ Big Red.

Some members of my stable were simply guys that other girls wanted, like the light-skinned boys that favored Al B. Sure!, the popular R and B singer of the day. Some were guys that no one wanted but I took on because, hey, you never know when your book bag might need carrying.

There was one type of guy that could make me get rid of all of the others: a guy with a car. This was not because I was a mini gold digger (not yet), but because a car guaranteed a way for me to zoom away from danger at the end of the school day. Goodbye, Christina! Goodbye, Tascha! Those girls could say they were going to kick my ass even more for being a ho, but they’d have to say it to the tailpipe.
Vrooom! Beep beep!

I didn’t need to be funny or smart, just tan. Lots of times, boys would compliment my complexion as their opening pickup line. “Y’all light-skinned girls are just so pretty,” some would say. I didn’t care that they felt that way for the same reason they wore gold rope chains and Jordan sneakers—because Big Daddy Kane did.

I became even more secure in my light skin when I discovered the mania was deeper than life imitating hip-hop. Sometimes, one of my boyfriends’ hip-hop-hating mothers would coo out, “I knew he’d bring home a pretty high-yellow girl,” or “Oooh, y’all going to have some pretty light babies!” I’d smile, getting an award for something I had nothing to do with.

Still, for every mother who loved me before I even opened my mouth, there were older versions of Christina who threw me shade for no reason. Will, a boyfriend I considered serious because we had been seeing each other for almost a whole month (and I only had one other boyfriend besides him), straight up told me that his mom didn’t like light-skinned people, especially women. If he hadn’t told me, I would have figured it out for myself. Every time I went over, she’d grunt out a hello and say nothing else, even if I tried to initiate a conversation with her. Did she know how many fake girlfriends I had to invent to even get out of the house to see her son? I thought I could win her over, even going so far as to plan to get a photo of me and my mother airbrushed on my jean jacket so she could see I came from dark-skinned stock.

One night, Will and I were driving home from the movies. We had started going to the movies in the suburbs because our regular haunt downtown had become a haven for bootleggers who would get mad at people for laughing (“Shut up, I’m taping, yo!”)

We were debating whether a family could actually leave their kid home alone when a police cruiser pulled behind us and followed us for more than a mile. My fears shifted from how I was going to hide my hickey from my mother to whether I was going to jail. Since some members of my boy pyramid had bad reputations, Miss Marlo had taken me on a tour of local juvenile halls, hoping to scare me straight. I lounged in the backseat of her car trying to look disinterested while thinking that I could survive in an all-girl gang. At the least, I’d make some tough girlfriends in jail and we’d all go back and kick the asses of everyone who’d put me there.

Will was not one of the bad boys, he was a young black man driving in a late-model car down a white suburban street. “Why are they messing with me?” he said, his good-guy hands nervously clutching the steering. Un-street-smart girl that I was, I turned around to look at the police car.

“Don’t look back! That’ll make them stop us!” Will reprimanded me.

Sure enough, the police car’s red and blue lights flickered on and Will pulled over. One officer approached my door and silently aimed his flashlight on the ignition. Will jingled his keys nonchalantly to show the officer that the car was not hotwired. By the time the cop on Will’s side asked for his license and registration, four more police cars had come screeching up with their lights on, sirens blaring.

“Can I ask what I’m being stopped for, officer?” Will asked.

“There was a robbery in the area,” the cop responded, his eyes scanning me and the rest of the car’s interior. He was lying. I could just tell (it also didn’t hurt that the only black officer there put her gun down and rolled her eyes when she heard him). I wondered if the next thing out of the cop’s mouth wasn’t going to be that the supposed assailants committed the robbery with the brick-sized Kit Kat sitting on the dashboard, left over from the movie.

A string of cars, mostly full of white people returning to their suburban homes, slowed down to stare at us. They were probably wondering if the house we’d broken into was near theirs; surely, that was what warranted the four cop cars surrounding us.

“Shit, he’s probably going to plant some drugs,” Will said, and put his head in his hands after giving the officer permission to search the trunk. Guys often complained about cops doing that; I thought they were lying until I dated a cop who admitted to it, explaining that he had forty-eight hours to turn over evidence taken from a crime scene and sometimes kept a small stash just to bust someone with. “It’s frustrating to catch someone you know is selling drugs and not find anything,” he said, explaining to me that I’d only understand if I was a cop.

Luckily for Will and me, there was no plant. After a half hour, we were sent on our way with “better safe than sorry” and “go straight home.”
Why? So we don’t get stopped again?
We took heed of the officer’s words, but only because Will was pissed. As soon as he hit his mom’s door, he unleashed and screamed out to his mom what happened. He wasn’t mad that they’d stopped him. If they’d stopped only him, he’d be fine, he said. It was that they ruined our date.

Will’s mom was watching television and seemed concerned until he mentioned the date. Then she went back to watching television, saying, “Oh, well, you shouldn’t be riding through the suburbs with her light ass. That white cop probably thought you were with a white girl. That’s why he stopped you.”

I was crushed. I thought I was a part of the “driving while black” experience that had just happened—a victim, even—but apparently I’d caused it. Who did I think I was, being high yellow at night on a suburban street? How could I not know that such a combination would bring the black man down?

Will stepped between his mother and the television. Lord, don’t let any fighting start, I thought. I can’t even fight the girls at school, so I know I’m not prepared to swing on anyone’s mother.

“Will, just take me home, it’s okay,” I said, grabbing his arm.

“He’s not taking you nowhere, that’s my car,” his mom said, still not looking away from the television set. “Don’t ever get somewhere you can’t get home from.”

Will got permission to walk me to the subway. We knew it was over for us. I was more pissed than heartbroken, pissed that his mother had decided for us. Pissed that he couldn’t be some urban Romeo and choose me over his family. When I hopped off the subway and saw I’d missed the last bus home, I was pissed for being so dumb as to give up my other guys with cars for Will.

I headed to the phone booth and pulled out my little black book. I started calling guys I hadn’t talked to in months in search of a ride home. I was only three names into the A’s when I reached someone.

“Hey, Ali, I need a ride home,” I said, using my sexiest desperate teenage voice.

“Who’s this?”

“It’s Angie,” I said.

“Light-skinned Angie?”

“Yeah,” I said.

I heard him pick up his keys. “I’ll be right there.”