Mixed: My Life in Black and White (15 page)

When I got to the Psychology Department, the receptionist directed me back to a closet-size teaching assistant’s office where three twenty-something white men sat. I recognized only one from the day I took the pretest. They said hello warmly; all six eyes watched me as I took the only open seat.

“Ms. Nissel, we finished scoring your test and you don’t qualify for the study,” said the one in the middle. I wondered why they couldn’t have just told me that over the phone. I broke a sweat to come over here, I thought.

“Based on your test answers, we feel you should talk to someone. You seem to show signs of depression,” he continued.

The room felt smaller and stuffier than it already was. I felt trapped and angry. I was about to cry. How dare white guys who knew nothing about me other than one hundred answers in a number-2 pencil tell me I needed help? Was this part of the psychology experiment? Let’s see what happens when three grown white guys lock a black girl in a room and tell her she’s crazy during her first semester of classes?

While I was trying to figure out what to do, who to curse out, they offered to give me the names of some psychiatrists.

I got up and choked back tears. “I come in here to help you with your study and you tell me I’m crazy?”

“Well, we don’t like to use the word
crazy,
” I heard a voice say before I ran down the hallway.

I powered back to DuBois with my head down. If anyone said anything to me I was liable to explode into tears. I’d been doing that a lot lately for no apparent reason. I’d get an A on a test and I’d cry. Hormones, I reasoned. I was living with three women and our periods were all shifting toward one another.

Terrell was in the library. I pulled him into the hall and told him what had just happened.

“It was probably a government program designed to get information on black college students,” he said, rubbing my shoulders. He told me not to worry about the depressed part. “Black women are too resilient to get depressed,” he said. “You don’t ever hear about women in Africa taking Prozac,” he added.

Yes, of course. A depressed black woman was about as unthinkable as a feminist black woman. Righteous black people knew the two didn’t go together. My mood swings were definitely hormonal. I went to my room, where I felt relieved for about ten minutes, and then started crying again. I called Mah, who echoed Terrell’s thoughts.

“Don’t let them white boys get in your head. They just want to drug you,” he said. “Do you think our ancestors had the luxury of depression when they were being whipped and working in those fields?” Again, I felt better for ten minutes, and then for no apparent reason I started crying again.

I needed a woman’s perspective. I started walking over to Milani’s room. Milani was my best friend on campus. She was also biracial and had attended a few Nation of Islam Lite meetings earlier in the year. She’d stopped going because she was in love and her new boyfriend, Tamas, needed her to braid his hair every Sunday. He was a Hebrew Israelite, and according to the rules of his religion it was a sin to cut your hair.

Milani and I looked so much alike people thought we were twins despite the fact that she was two years ahead of me. Occasionally, people would ask us how we could hate white people when we ourselves were half white.

“Half white doesn’t make you all white,” she’d say. “One drop of black blood makes you black,” I’d chime in—using the words I’d first heard from my mother but now heard all the time.

Milani and I both thought we looked a little better and a little blacker with a tan. We’d sneak off after meetings to get a dose of UV radiation from Sun on the Run tanning salon. We’d make self-deprecating jokes to the staff at the tanning salon, sure that they’d never had black customers before; then we’d go study together and talk about the goddamn white man.

I had a suspicion that her boyfriend, Tamas, didn’t like me. Milani would tense up when we were together. The first time we met, he questioned me excessively about my background, particularly my father. What country were his ancestors from? Was
his
father from Italy? I figured he was just another paranoid black nationalist, so I had answered his every question in detail.

When I got to Milani’s room, Tamas opened the door. He greeted me halfheartedly and stomped out. I noticed that she had redecorated in the past few days; her Africa poster had been replaced with a gold-tone Star of David ornament.

Milani looked like she had been crying. I thought she was about to tell me that someone had died. I felt embarrassed for interrupting her with my trivial problem.

“Girl, I was just upset at something these white boys did to me today,” I said, waving my hand as I said the words, trying to indicate that it wasn’t a big deal. Milani pressed me for what had happened.

I told her, laughing at how silly it all was.

“Talibah, they’re telling the truth.
You
could be depressed.” She emphasized the word
you
as if to say,
You could but not me.

She went on. “I know this is going to come as a shock to you, but we can’t be friends anymore. Tamas has taught me the truth about race: A child is the race of his father,” she said. “You’re an Edomite. I am from the tribe of Judah, God’s chosen tribe,” she added.

I looked at her like she was insane. Was she saying what I thought she was—that although we both had a white parent, she was more black?

“Are you sure your father isn’t Sicilian?” she asked, with hope in her voice. “Sicilians are from the Tribe of Judah. You know, the whole Moor thing and all.”

I almost lied and said he was. Unfortunately, only his mother was Sicilian and women’s genes didn’t seem to count in her new faith. I walked out of her room and slammed the door. I was upset at losing a friend, but more upset that another group had decided I still wasn’t black enough.
After all the work I’d put in, not eating meat
and missing parties?
At least I still have Mah, I thought.

Two days after Milani broke the news to me that I was the same white devil I’d been railing against, Mah accused me of giving him syphilis.

“Are you sure you didn’t cheat on me? Then how come I’m on the white man’s antibiotics?” he asked, shaking the orange pill bottle in my face. For a week, I scared myself sick, thinking perhaps I had had dormant syphilis for years and had given it to my black prince. Only after I came up negative for syphilis twice did he admit that when he wasn’t spreading the news about the evils of the white man, he enjoyed going to parties and having unprotected sex with women in bathrooms. He also admitted that he had another girlfriend on the side who would be more fit to run his school. As if the week wasn’t bad enough with losing a friend and finding out I was going to Edomite Hell, he pulled out her photo. She was that perfect brown toast color I’d been trying to achieve by all my hours at Sun on the Run. She also had on short shorts. A far cry from the conservatively dressed African queen he claimed to prefer.

That was the straw that broke the depressed black woman’s back. That night, I slept for twenty hours but was still unable to get out of bed. When I finally rolled over, I used all my strength to turn to PSYCHIATRISTS in the phone book.

“I think I need to see someone,” I whispered into the phone, so that my strong black female roommates couldn’t hear me.

I never made it to the psychiatrist that year. I didn’t make it anywhere outside of my dorm room, actually. I spent all my energy faking normalcy in my voice when people called to see why I wasn’t in class. I told some people I had the flu, some people I had asthma, some people that I was just really busy with schoolwork. I wished everyone would leave me alone but secretly hoped that someone could tell I was lying and come rescue me. I wanted to die, but the wish made me mad at myself. I didn’t have the energy to commit suicide, and I was mad at myself for that, too. I took in-completes in all my classes.

Sophomore year, I moved off campus. Living alone was the perfect incubator for depression. There were no roommates to notice that I hadn’t taken a shower or that I’d been crying all day. I could wake up, order in Ben and Jerry’s, and cry myself back to sleep. Finally, when I received potential failure notices from all my classes, I decided to hit the Yellow Pages again.

Though it would have been easier, there was no way I was going to the university’s Student Health Center, even though rumor had it they were dispensing Prozac as freely as they did condoms. I was not going to risk someone seeing me in the psychiatric waiting room. I looked through the phone book until I found a doctor with an ethnic-sounding last name.

Dr. Nami talked to me for about ten minutes and gave me a pocket-size trial pack of Prozac. She said it might take some time to feel better, but I felt slightly better just having the drugs in my pocket. The receptionist at Dr. Nami’s office informed me that, to get additional visits, I’d have to call my insurance and get approved. I’d never had to do that for a doctor’s visit before.

“Only for mental health visits and chiropractors, the step-children of medicine,” she said.

Talking to a phone customer-service rep is a challenge for me even on a
non
depressed day. While most people get frustrated pushing touch-tone buttons and talking to a computerized voice, I get mad when I key in the wrong combination of numbers and actually have to talk to a human representative. I prefer computers. Computers don’t come in with an attitude after being stuck in traffic. They don’t decide they hate your voice and put you on hold forever. Computers are one of the few places where everyone has a level playing field. You get out what you put in, without prejudice.

I punched every button on my touch-tone phone, attempting not to get transferred to a human being. Every time I heard “Please hold for the next available representative,” I’d hang up. After two hours of that game, I gave in. I was transferred to a male customer-service rep who sounded about seventeen years old and had only half of his attention on me. I heard the rustle of fast-food wrappers in the background. The customer-service rep’s voice was robotic and his words were separated with long pauses, like he was reading a script from a slow-moving computer.

“Hello”—long pause, sound of him repeatedly hitting the space bar—“my name is Tad. What can I help you with”—pause, sound of him typing—“this afternoon?”

I told Tad I had to get approval to see a psychiatrist. I imagined he would transfer me to a doctor or fax some forms to my nearest Kinko’s so I could pick them up.

“Sure, I can help you with that, I just have to”—thirty-second pause—“ask you some safety questions.”

What the hell are safety questions? Like, do I know what a solid double line on a highway means?

“Sure,” I replied, hesitantly.

“How many times have you seen a psychiatrist in the past year?”

This was too embarrassing. I had barely got up the nerve to talk to a psychiatrist and now I was letting a teenager—who was probably reading
Maxim
magazine as he talked to me—know how crazy I felt.

I held my finger to the phone’s receiver, ready to hang up.
How
many times have you seen a psychiatrist?
is not a safety question, I thought. Whose safety is that question for, the financial safety of the insurance company? Why don’t they just call it what it is, a question about my past psychological state? Why the dumbeddown talk? I hate this. I hate everyone.

I took a deep breath. “I’ve been to a psychiatrist once, but I can’t go again until I get approval from you.”

I felt like Tad was typing
Failure
into my file, but I held in there, answering
no
when he asked me if I heard voices or had thoughts of harming people. I said
yes
when he asked if I had interrupted sleeping patterns. I wanted to ask him some questions about himself, since he had my whole life on the screen in front of him, like what brand of chips was he chewing in my ear? I restrained myself from doing that.

“Do you have thoughts of suicide?”

“Yes.”

“Right now?”

“Yes. Because of how long this phone call is taking,” I said. There was a long pause before he asked his next question.

“Okay, we’re almost done. Can you verify your current address for me?”

I did. I could hear what sounded like him pounding on his keyboard.

“My computer is going slow; please hold for a second,” he said.

While I was holding, there was a knock on my door. I looked through the peephole.
Cops. Oh, my goodness.
I opened the door.

Before me stood two police officers: Officer Grey, a beefy bulldog-looking middle-aged white guy with the kind of long mustache that must be fun to twirl in the mirror when no one is watching, and his partner, Officer Jenkins. She was a younger black female cop with a stylish haircut partially tucked under her cap. She looked like someone I might enjoy clubbing with if I wasn’t so depressed.

“Are you Angela Nissel?” Officer Grey asked me. I nodded.

“Do you want to kill yourself?”

I couldn’t believe it. Tad had called the cops on me.

“No! I don’t want to kill myself!”

Officer Grey tilted his head and looked at my neck.

“Then what’s that mark on your neck?”

“I burned myself with a curling iron!” I said. After I found out Mah was cheating, I gave up on natural no-fuss hairstyles. I was through with attracting righteous men for a while.

I looked to the black officer for help. Surely, she with her perm would back me up. “Won’t you tell him it’s a curling-iron burn?” I pleaded.

“Well, it does
look
like a curling-iron burn,” she said. I laughed out loud at the seriousness of their faces and the thought of a suicidal girl crying out, “I can’t straighten my hair or my life out!” and holding a hot iron up to her neck.

It was the first time I’d laughed in over two weeks. Unfortunately, cops don’t like it when you laugh at them.