Mixed: My Life in Black and White (3 page)

I decided I would rebel against face painting and started to color my hair with burnt umber. If Sister Mary asked, I’d tell her I couldn’t get to my face; I had way too much hair. As I was coloring in the top of my left braid, Sister Mary called out to Jackie, Greg, and Eddie, “You three can come up to get crayons to make your faces darker too, if you want.”

Of course they didn’t want to. Didn’t Sister Mary get it? We just wanted to fit in.

Tommy “Blimp” McCallum sat next to me, so I looked at his picture. Despite his nickname, he’d drawn himself thin as a rail. I wondered why Sister didn’t suggest that Tommy draw himself with a double chin. Would it be wrong for me to raise my hand and suggest that? Tommy—like me, Jackie, Eddie, and Greg—drew himself as he
wished
he looked—as close to the majority and the popular kids as possible.

When we finished our drawings and broke for recess, I ran over to Karen and Kelly. They were the unpopular white girls (they didn’t have perms) and the only friends I’d made so far. They knew how embarrassed I was. They knew what it felt like to have Sister Mary make a spectacle of you, so they did what all compassionate friends do, teased me about it in hopes I’d start laughing.

“Angela, color yourself in!” Karen said, mocking Sister Mary’s voice.

I rolled my eyes and looked down. I wasn’t ready to laugh yet. Sister Mary was wrong about chitlins and she was wrong about my complexion.

“She’s so mean,” I said, hoping to steer the conversation to something else mean Sister did.

“Did you color yourself in?” Karen asked.

“No!” I exclaimed, as if even the thought of coloring my face in disgusted me.

“Well, you’re almost the same color as us,” Kelly said, and held her arm out next to mine. Karen held her arm out, too. My arm was darker, but not by much.

I flipped my hand so my palm faced the sky.

“On this side of our hands we’re the same color,” I said.

“Maybe this is your white side!” Karen exclaimed, pressing her palm against mine. I smiled politely at my new friend’s observation, even though I knew that wasn’t how the whole mixing-races thing worked. I was happy for the moment just to be accepted.

Mulatto Pride Turbo Boost

“You’re half-white, which makes you half all right!”

—George Jefferson

When it came to getting new electronics, my father was
the consumerism king of the block. Every Saturday morning, he would brag to our next door neighbor about his latest acquisition while they were washing their cars. “Yeah, I just picked up this remote control that—hold on to your hat—isn’t attached by a long cord to the TV.” The next thing you know, people were pouring out of their row houses to test out our new devices. For a week after we got a refrigerator that dispensed ice and water straight from the door, people came by with big Slurpee cups, filling up and praising our appliance.

“This sure is something. How much a thing like this run?” our neighbor Mr. Glen asked, not paying attention as the water overflowed from his cup onto the floor.

“It’s magic! A magic ice machine!” a woman we barely knew exclaimed, pressing for more ice and then giggling as it hit the bottom of her cup.

My father’s latest purchase was a VCR that loaded from the top and churned as loudly as a food processor while rewinding. This VCR cemented our status as the most technologically advanced family on the block, and it provided me with a new way to overdose on my favorite activity—watching television.

When my parents started giving me an allowance for doing my chores, I negotiated for a 25 percent pay cut in order to extend my bedtime so I could watch
Knight Rider
and
Gimme a Break.
On school days, my mother would have to blast “Sexual Healing” by Marvin Gaye on my Fisher-Price record player to wake me up, but Saturday morning I’d be in front of the television at 7:30 A.M. sharp to catch up with my cartoons. My week would be ruined if I missed
Smurfs.
I didn’t just watch them, I studied them. I could have written my third-grade dissertation on the closed market economy of the Smurf Village. I would pretend I was Smurfette and would frustrate my parents by refusing to improve my adjective vocabulary; to me, everything was “smurfy.”

The smurfiest event of my childhood became my weekly trips to the video store with my father. Sometimes, if I’d gotten spanked during the week, my guilt-ridden father would salve my sore behind with an extra video store trip. In the middle of a whupping that barely hurt, I’d think, If I cry really loud like I’m dying, I’ll get to rent a
Woody Woodpecker
tape.

Video Tape Library was a small store in our local strip mall. My father would let my brother and me pick out a cartoon tape while he looked at the new arrivals. I had just picked out my
Heckle and
Jeckle
tape when Dad called out that it was time to go. I grabbed J.R.’s hand and followed him to the counter, where we stood by my father and waited for him to pay. The cashier suddenly stopped ringing up the videos and glanced down quizzically at my brother and me, then up to my father. “Do you know whose kids these are?” the cashier asked.

“Never seen them in my life,” my father said, his eyes scanning our bodies, like if he concentrated hard enough he might figure out how these two kids got by his side.

Maybe Dad’s gone crazy or has amnesia, I thought. Did he hit himself in the head recently? On the very cartoon tapes we rented from this place, I’d seen how, when characters fell off ladders, stars would orbit around their heads and they couldn’t remember their own names. I tried to think whether my father had fallen recently or if I’d seen stars around his head. My brother probably didn’t think anything. He was only two and the only word he had mastered was “bye-bye.”

The cashier leaned over the counter so he could be at my eye level.

“Where are your parents?” he asked.

Hello, I’m a kid; probably the guy I’m standing next to and the guy my brother looks like a tan version of—that would be a parent. Of course, I didn’t say that; I couldn’t figure out what to do. My mind was overloaded by my father’s denial of me. If your father denies you, should you deny him, too? The cashier is a stranger so I’m not allowed to speak to him without a trusted adult around but since my father has denied ever seeing me, technically he’s no longer a trusted adult. I looked up at my father and tried to send him a telepathic message:
Come back, Dad. Think really hard. You
do
remember me.
He met my gaze with a blank look, so I stayed silent and stared at the cashier.

By this time, the cashier had to have been thinking, Great, I’ve not only got two lost black kids, they’re also deaf-mutes. He tried a new tactic: rewording the question and speaking in the exaggeratedly loud, slow voice normally reserved for people who don’t understand English.

“Who did you come to the vid-ee-o store with?” he yelled, his frustration mounting.

My father looked down at me like he was expecting an answer as well. I refused to speak to either of them.

With an expression that in my advanced age I now recognize as the
I don’t get paid enough for this shit
look, the cashier stood back up and addressed the entire shopping audience.

“Whose kids are these?” he yelled. Everyone in the small video store glanced pitifully at the two lost black kids, shrugged their shoulders, and went back to perusing the tape selections.

I swear, incidents like this from my childhood are why I hate being stared at to this day. I’m so self-conscious, I leave home only when the line of cars on my street starts moving through the green light. If I leave on the red, people have nothing to entertain themselves with until the light changes, so they stare at me. I hate it. It makes me late for work.

With all corners of the store eyeballing me, I thought the next step would be some strange family snatching me up, claiming I belonged to them. The terror of losing my mother and my poodle kicked in. I yelled “Dad!” and yanked his T-shirt.

My father laughed. “These are my kids, man.” The cashier looked at him for a moment, to ascertain if he was joking, and then lowered his head.

“I’m sorry. I thought, because they were . . .” The cashier’s voice trailed off and he started ringing up our tapes. He gave the bar codes the same rapt attention I’ve seen anthropology professors give to rare caveman skulls, and handed our rentals over to us without a further word.

That was my last trip to Video Tape Library. I never wanted to go back after that. My father asked why I had suddenly lost interest in renting movies. Didn’t I know
The Muppet Movie
had just been released? I wasn’t sure how to explain my embarrassment to him, and I also felt I had let my parents down. I knew from my mother’s lectures that I was supposed to be proud to be mixed, but the video store cashier had embarrassed me and I preferred to give up my hobby rather than ever feel like that again. I lied to my father and told him that VHS was out and I was interested only in Betamax movies, as that’s the type of VCR the other parents on our block had started buying.

I had to find a new way to quench my craving for the programming that video tapes had previously provided. Because of those tapes, I hadn’t had to suffer through reruns in over a year, and the thought of having to watch a show where I already knew the ending felt like punishment. I decided to explore other channels; to see what else was on when I got home from school.

I flipped the dial to a talk show. Even though I was catching up to the topic in the middle of the program, I quickly gathered that everyone in the studio audience agreed I should never have been born.

You couldn’t turn on
Phil Donahue
in those days without seeing something about interracial couples. Invariably, the topic turned to What if the couples decided to have sex (the horror!) and gave birth to flawed, confused-race children? While people were generally in agreement that a grown man and woman could marry whomever they wished, the moment would come when a studio audience member would snatch the host’s microphone, almost inhaling it before shouting, “Do you think it’s fair to bring kids into the world who won’t know who they are? What about the kids?” The studio audience would hoot and clap enthusiastically while Donahue smiled at them and said, “And we’ll be back!”

I waited for them to come back. I was certain that when the commercials ended, I would see someone on the show who looked like me. A mixed-race kid, sticking up for all of us, telling everyone how beautiful and special we were.

That person never came out. I started realizing that no one on television looked like me. Not too many people were my mother’s color, but at least she had a few representations—two and a half by my count: Nell Carter, Tootie, and the chunky mammy character from
Tom and Jerry
(the half point, since they only showed her calves). As stereotypical as they were, at least she had them. I started doubting my mother’s stories about biracial children being beautiful and special. I began to suspect that my brother and I were the only mixed kids alive. I plotted to sneak up on my mother at an unexpected moment to see if she’d break down and confirm my suspicion.

“Mom, where are all the other mixed kids?” I asked while she was watching the news. She didn’t like being interrupted when the Action News Team was on. My mother and her friends watched that newscast like they were being graded on it the next day. They all dressed their children according to the predictions of Dave Roberts, the quirky weatherman. If someone was caught in a hurricane without an umbrella, there was no pity, just admonishment. “Didn’t you listen to Dave last night?”

Dave was king and the female news anchor, Lisa Thomas-Laury, was queen. The adults talked about her reports as though she called the news straight to their phones instead of delivering it to two million Philadelphians simultaneously through the television. “Yeah, Lisa Thomas-Laury said the buses are going on strike,” I heard my mother tell my father. Adult women carefully enunciated all three of Lisa Thomas-Laury’s names, never disrespecting her by referring to her casually as Lisa.

“Lots of people are mixed,” my mother said, looking at the ceiling as if she kept the mixed people’s names written up there. “Like . . . uh . . . Lisa Thomas-Laury.”

“She has green eyes!” I said. “She’s white!”

“Who said mixed and black people can’t have green eyes?” my mother replied. “My father has blue eyes.” She was right; her father did have blue eyes. It wasn’t until I was much older that I realized everyone with cataracts had the same cloudy blue eyes.

After that day, I became Lisa Thomas-Laury’s youngest devotee. I would gladly sit through the whole newscast to see the only other mixed person I knew. I summoned the courage to ask my mother to help me mail her a letter. We decided on a postcard, since a prestigious woman like Lisa Thomas-Laury was probably too busy to open mail. I went with a simple greeting.
Hi, Mrs. Lisa
Thomas-Laury. I’m mixed, too! Write back!

She never wrote back. That could have been because, as I would later find out, she was not mixed and probably had no idea what the hell my postcard meant.

Back then, I didn’t know my mother would lie to encourage self-love. In my mind, Lisa Thomas-Laury’s lack of response meant she’d received my postcard, read it, and immediately trashed it. During school, I would daydream about the possible ways she had rid herself of my unwanted postcard—I had a full-blown panic attack during religion class after I fantasized about Ms. Thomas-Laury ripping my note up then tossing it under her car’s tires for traction in a snowstorm. Watching her newscasts became painful; I was certain that she was just waiting for the right moment to annouce on air how she felt about my postcard. “That’s some bad weather, Dave. Speaking of bad, I received the most stupid fan letter recently. . . .”

My mother soon realized I was spiraling into a depression whenever the news came on. She knew what she had to do—lie about another celebrity.

“David Hasselhoff is half black and half white,” my mother mentioned casually after I collapsed into a crying spell while watching Lisa Thomas-Laury host the Thanksgiving Parade.

“Look at his skin! It’s as tan as yours. And his hair,” my mother continued. “Isn’t that what your hair looks like when it rains?”

She was right. Michael Knight did have a curly ’fro! However, I still wasn’t ready to risk the rejection of an unanswered fan letter, so I decided instead that my new idol would be the subject of my Black History Month oral presentation.

My new teacher, Sister Danielle, had given our class the assignment of independently researching an important black American to speak about. After sixteen consecutive oral reports on Martin Luther King, Sister Danielle expanded the topic criteria—we could also write about important people who were friends with black Americans.

The last day of February, I fidgeted in my seat as Emma Russell, the most popular girl in fourth grade, gave a stellar black history report on Abraham Lincoln. It was terrifying enough reading in front of the entire class without having to follow the Emancipation Proclamation done as a football cheer.

I took a deep breath before taking my place at the front of the classroom. I paced myself and held my head high as I rattled off two minutes and thirty seconds of David Hasselhoff trivia. Then I hit my last paragraph:

“Like me, David Hasselhoff has a German last name and a black mother.”

Half the class burst into laughter. Rather than wait for them to settle down, I bit back tears and zoomed through the last sentences of my report.

“Knight Rider is a great show. It comes on Channel six at eight P.M. The end.”

Sister Danielle asked if anyone had any questions for me. Tony Aiello, class bully, who was later expelled for breaking into the church and stealing a tape recorder, raised his hand.

“Knight Rider’s not part black!” Tony called out.

“That’s not a question, Tony,” Sister Danielle snapped. “Phrase it as a question.”

“Why would you lie and say Knight Rider is mixed?” Tony asked. His face turned bright purple, and his lips twisted like he wanted to curse me for sullying the sacred name of the premier nighttime television star.