Mixed: My Life in Black and White (12 page)

Too Black, Too Poor

Like any American group achieving contemporary middle class station, black entrée into the culture of consumption made status an obsession and addiction to simulate a way of life.

—Cornel West,
Race Matters

At the beginning of ninth grade, my mother decided to
move us to an all-black middle-class neighborhood on the edge of Philadelphia.

Our new block was full of conspicuous-consumption-minded colored folks; it was a showcase of late-model cars and high-end above-ground pools. Some homeowners went a step further, erecting columns and faux-marble lions to guard their row homes.

“I remember when this used to be swampland,” my grandmother said as she limped up the steps to our new rental house. “Now it’s uppity-Negro land.”

My neighborhood was known to most of my black school-mates as “the Black Boonies” or “the Coonies.” Few students admitted living there, instead claiming the vaguer “Southwest Philly” as their home base. To admit you were from the Black Boonies could make you a target: kids from tougher neighborhoods assumed that you were weak and your family had lots of money.

Most Boonie households actually didn’t have a lot of money. The adults held government jobs and put in truckloads of overtime to pay for their lion statues.

Right away, I could tell we weren’t going to fit in. We were the only single-parent family, we were the only people with mismatched hubcaps on our car, and, as we heard through the fast-moving neighborhood grapevine, we were the only (gasp!) renters.

“I know your landlord,” Doison, an older girl who lived on the corner, told me, after my mother prodded me to go outside and make friends. “Did your landlord tell you that an eighty-year-old white lady died in your house?”

What was I supposed to say to that? My landlord had told me nothing; in fact, no one in our family had actually met the man. All I knew was he was African and the transaction was done entirely through his white girlfriend, who worked at the hospital with my mother. From what I’d gathered through eavesdropping, the white girlfriend and my mother were kinda “interracial couples” buddies and the white lady convinced her African boyfriend to rent us the house at the lowest rate he could afford. It was our first and only instance of interracial affirmative action.

“I was there the day the coroner carried her out. Her hand was all pale and it fell out from the bag and everyone screamed—”

“Doison!” her mom exclaimed, embarrassed. “You don’t tell someone that about their house!”

Doison’s mom was in her post office uniform, looking up into her front tree as she ran a broom through its leaves.

“Got it!” Doison’s mom yelled, and I watched in horror as a nest holding two hairless baby birds dropped to the ground. Doison’s mom then grabbed the hose from her garage and power-sprayed the nest and the baby birds into the sewer. Having completed her murder, she pumped her fists in the air and shouted, “That’s what y’all get for pooping on my coupe!”

She then turned to me. “Welcome to the neighborhood.”

“Nice to meet you,” I lied, before running in to tell my mother the crazy shit I’d just witnessed.

“That’s disgusting,” my mother said. “I’ll never understand how people can love their cars more than living creatures. As long as a car gets you where you’re going and back, that’s all you need.”

The next day, as if God was testing her on that statement, our Ford Granada conked out while my mother was driving home from work. To replace it, she bought a nineteen-year-old Chevy Nova for $125 from the Pennysaver. The Nova’s floor was rusted through, and the roof and front window leaked when it rained. Somebody must have paid a mechanic off because it had passed state inspection. It did not, however, pass the muster of our block. Doison and the other kids would yell out the names of cars and other items they’d be less embarrassed to be seen in whenever my mother chugged down the block. “I’d rather drive a lawn mower!” “A Yugo!” “A donkey!”

Because of the car’s leaky front window, my mother often had to wear a rain bonnet while driving, and my brother and I had to ride together in the backseat. To avoid watching Doison make fun of us, my brother and I would dive to the floor of the backseat whenever we reached our neighborhood. The more we hid, the angrier my mother became. “If you don’t like my car, you can get out and walk!” My brother and I would look at each other, crouched on the dirty floor of the Nova.
Is she serious? Because if she
is, I’d really rather walk.

Luckily, yelling out our car’s inadequacies was as rough as it would get in that hood. Our neighbors viewed themselves as urban sophisticates, and fighting was for poor people—more precisely, niggas. That neighborhood was the first time I heard the word
nigga
used by black people derogatorily about other black people. Until then, my friends and I used the word as a synonym for “close male friend” (as in “That’s my nigga!”). Now a nigga was a lower-class black person that good hardworking black people had nothing in common with—the people formerly known as Real Black People.

Oh, how I wished my mother could be a nigga just for a second. I wanted her to pop one of those “Yugo” screamers square in the jaw. My mother only wanted to keep the peace: just ride in her Nova, feed her kids, and pay her bills. Even when some women on the block gossiped that she’d moved to the block looking for a husband to steal (what else would a single woman with kids be trying to do?), she didn’t confront anyone. The next rumor was that she was on welfare (look at her car, plus how could a woman on her own afford the rent on that house?), but she shook that one off, too.

“Some black people are like crabs in a barrel,” she explained. “As soon as they see one doing well, they’ll pull him down.” To me, it sounded like being a crab was worse than being a nigga.

My mom hadn’t moved us to the all-black Boonies to teach me about crabs or niggas; she says it was simply to get us out of a small apartment and into a house. I do wonder if she moved us to that neighborhood because she knew it would cause my fear of black girls to disappear. There was no way to hate black girls when you lived in an all-black neighborhood; if I did, I’d be hating a lot of people who looked awfully similar to me. At least half of the people in my neighborhood had my complexion, and since my mother had decided that I was old enough for a relaxer, my hair was now bone straight and no longer stuck out as “good.” No one ever asked me if I was biracial and I never thought about it. I read an article in one of my mother’s
Ebony
magazines detailing how 90 percent of black people have European ancestry. I just have a little more than most black people, I deduced.

I came to view white people as the rest of the people in our neighborhood did. They took on this kind of city health inspector quality; we always had to be clean and on our best behavior in case they showed up. If girls on the street started to argue too loudly or if someone went outside with wrinkled clothes, the favored parental admonishment was, “You’re acting just like white people want you to act. They’ll say,
See, those black people live in a nice part of
town and still act the fool!
” Kids fell in line quickly when an adult said that. The thought of a white person looking down on them was more terrifying than a month’s worth of punishment.

About a year after we moved, I was forced to remember exactly how much European blood I had.

“Would you believe Urban invited us to Diane’s wedding?” my mother asked me.

Huh? Who invited us where?

“Your paternal grandfather. I haven’t spoken to that side of the family in years. I think it would be rude not to go, though.”

At the time, one quarter of my hair was shaved almost bald like that of my newest favorite rapper, MC Lyte. The short area always had designs etched in it, courtesy of a barbershop’s clippers. My mom begged me to let my latest design (the word
def
) grow out before we saw our white relatives.

My brother asked if my father would be there. My mother said his sister disliked him and left it at that. I figured I really had to be on my best behavior around these white people. If one cut off their own brother from coming to a wedding, they’d sure cut my black ass off at the slightest infraction.

After two hours on some roads I am certain no black people have ever traveled before, we arrived at the church right on time. When we came through the church doors, half the wedding party gasped and clutched their hearts like we were Jesus himself walking on water and into their church. I wanted to run out. I pulled on my mother’s arm like I was a little girl. “Just walk in,” she said, through clenched smiling teeth, trying to kill everyone with the kindness that was shooting out of her eyes. I grabbed my brother’s hand, something I was way too cool to do in Philly. I figured, if we were getting lynched, we’d go down as a family.

During the ceremony, I sat uncomfortably close to my mother. She gave surreptitious glances toward unrecognizable faces. “That’s your cousin,” she whispered, pointing to a red-haired boy about my age in the front row. “You met him when you were four.” I didn’t remember any of them and felt no connection.

After the ceremony, my grandfather shouted, “There’s my granddaughter!” and came running over to me with outstretched arms. I was glad he knew who I was because I couldn’t remember what he looked like and would have hugged and kissed any white man over sixty if my mother had told me he was my grandfather.

“That’s wild!” he said, and I politely thanked my grandfather for the “wild!” He was too loud, the attention felt forced, like he was doing it for other people. If he was so happy to see me, why hadn’t he called me in years?

As I spun around, showing my grandfather the layers of my hairdo, I saw my aunt’s new husband’s eyes widen in shock. It reminded me of all the hateful stares from my childhood pasta-gathering missions. When my aunt introduced us to our new uncle, he gave me a stiff hug with a pat on the back. For the first time since I’d moved to the Boonies, I wished I was whiter. Not only so I wouldn’t stick out, but so I wouldn’t make the groom, one of the most important people of the day, uncomfortable. I felt offensive in my own skin.

The reception was in the basement of the church, and I kept drinking water so I wouldn’t have to talk to anyone. Of course, with all that water, I had to find the ladies’ room, but I was afraid to go alone. I held it in, shaking, until my mother got up to go, too.

When we walked in, the bathroom went silent. Women know when someone’s been talking about them, and both my mother and myself knew we had just been on people’s lips. Refusing to stoop to their level, my mother smiled again and went into the only open stall.

“So, Janice, which one married the colored lady? Is he here?” came a voice from the stall next to my mother’s, that of a woman in the middle of a long pee, unaware that the colored lady had entered.

“I married Jack, Urban’s son,” my mother replied over the stall. The room fell silent for a moment, followed by a rush of toilet flushes, closing compacts, and high heels clicking out the door across the linoleum.

My mom was obviously shaken. She called me into her stall because she couldn’t steady her hand to pin her slip back on to her skirt (the slip’s elastic had given out over a year ago and she didn’t find it necessary to splurge on a new slip when safety pins worked just as well). After I secured the slip to her skirt, we walked back out, just in time to throw some rice at the bride and groom.

My mom was totally composed when we hit the church steps. With her head poised like an Ethiopian queen, she grabbed a handful of rice and pulled back her arm slowly and dramatically, like an Alvin Ailey dancer. When she threw the rice, she overextended her reach. We heard a rip. Her skirt dropped to the ground, taking her attached slip with it.

With all the white faces staring and nothing but her panties and control-top hose covering her bottom half, my mother grabbed her clothes and jumped behind some bushes to cover herself.

I felt horrible for my mother, but I had never seen anything funnier in my life. Tears shot out from my eyes while I convulsed trying to hold my laughs in. I knew not to laugh too hard in front of the white people.
Be on your best behavior.

While my mother wriggled her way back into her skirt behind the bushes, I pretended to be crying for the bride and groom. While dabbing at my eyes with a napkin, I wondered if acting good for the white folks at this point really made any difference. Was there any coming back from the half-naked black woman who jumped into a bush?

“Never again,” my mother said as we got into the car. My white relatives must have said the same thing, because we never saw or talked to any of them after that. Other than my father, I have no idea to this day what any of my white relatives look like.

After two hours of driving, we reached the edge of our neighborhood. When my brother and I crouched, as usual, on the floor of the car, my mother went off.

“After all we’ve been through today? Are you ashamed of me? If you don’t get up by the time we hit our block, you can both get your ungrateful butts out and walk!” my mother yelled at us through the rearview mirror. J.R. and I looked at each other, and for a second we felt really badly. Then, as soon as Mom came to a stop sign, I tried to take her up on her walking offer and pushed the rear door open, but the entire thing fell off, rusted from the hinges by recent rains. It sounded like a jackhammer as it hit the concrete.

“Oooh!” my brother yelled and pointed to me, as if it wasn’t obvious to my mother that the kid
outside
the car was the one who had broken the door.

Instant karma is a bitch. I had to help my mother lift the door and push it into the backseat of the car and then sit on top of it as we rode down the block. Doison led the block in a group rendition of the
Sanford and Son
theme as we pulled into our driveway.