Mixed: My Life in Black and White (5 page)

“Yeah, you better apologize, you fag,” Jimmy said, returning to his spot in the kickball game.

Once You Go Half Black

“What’s there to talk about?”

—Tom Cruise, responding to Oprah Winfrey’s
asking if he’s ever talked about race to his
biracial son

Whenever my mother called me
child,
I knew I was tap
dancing on her last nerve.

“Child, you really must not want Santa to come to our house tomorrow!” my mother yelled after I ignored her
go to bed
for the third time that night.

I had just turned eight and, like most other kids my age, I lived in fear of people I didn’t know (Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, the Lord) and the things they would deny me if I misbehaved (presents, money, the pearly gates of heaven). I wasn’t even certain I believed in Santa anymore, but I had more fear of offending the jolly white stranger than I did my mother. I’d be damned if I was going to risk getting coal in my stocking.

The next morning, I came downstairs and Santa was snoring on our sectional. It was the first time I gasped at the sight of another human being.

“He got tired and stayed here for the night,” my father explained, nudging Santa awake.

As Santa stood up, I noticed that he looked considerably skinnier than he did at Macy’s. He grabbed a Hefty bag full of presents from our coat closet and leaned in my face. “Have you been a good girl this year?” he asked. His eyes were bloodshot and his breath smelled hot and fruity, just like Mr. Ron’s, my dad’s alcoholic assistant.

“Mom, it’s Mr. Ron!” I screamed, running behind her legs.

“Ho, ho, ho, no, I’m not!” Mr. Ron said, reaching behind my mother to pick me up, blasting me again with his Mad Dog breath.

“Angela, stop being silly! That’s the real Santa!” my mother insisted.

“Seriously, Mom! That’s Mr. Ron!” I lowered my voice. “You know—the drunk!”

My mother gasped as if she had never used the word to describe this man. My father widened his eyes in horror. “Go to your room, immediately!” he commanded. “Now J.R. will get all Santa’s gifts and you’ll get nothing,” he went on as my brother walked down the stairs. My father grabbed my brother and plopped him into Mr. Ron’s lap. Instead of going straight to my room, I lingered on the steps to watch the action.

My brother took one look into Santa’s bloodshot eyes and started screaming and kicking. Santa tried to hold J.R. by the waist, but child fear must be stronger than adult muscle. My brother scratched at Mr. Ron’s face and eventually pulled his strap-on beard clean off.

I couldn’t resist screaming my righteousness from the steps. “I told you! It’s Mr. Ron!”

“Child, didn’t we tell you to go to your room?” my mother yelled. I scampered up the steps, mad as hell that I got in trouble for telling the truth.

I held on to that anger for months after Drunk Santa. I set out on a mission to disprove other illusions my parents had forced upon me. I stepped on every crack in the sidewalk (“Look, Mom, I didn’t break your back!”); I threw a fit in Sears (“How come the security guard isn’t arresting me, Mom? You said he’d handcuff me if I acted up”). She acquiesced that she had lied (“He might not arrest you, but I will whip your smart little behind if you don’t stop!”).

There was one illusion she seemed unwilling to give up. My mother insisted that, regardless of color, people were all the same.

Even at eight years old I could see that evidence to the contrary was everywhere we turned, as plain as Mr. Ron dressed up as Santa. I had no hard data on the differences between black and white men, but I suspected the patterns echoed that of the women. Through visits to my all-white playmates’ homes, I learned that white women smoked Virginia Slims, got perms, and headed to the Jersey Shore covered in tanning oil as soon as the weather went above 70 degrees.

Through trips to the all-black beauty salon with my mother, I learned that black women smoked Newports, got Jeri-Curls, and preferred to stay in someone’s air-conditioned house when the weather got hot. The only reason to go to Jersey was if a friend had organized a bus trip to Atlantic City.

Those beauty salon visits also taught me not only that people were not equal in their daily habits but, actually, that people of different races should stay separated. Black people walking through white neighborhoods could lead to violence and food waste.

“Miss Jessie was on her way to church and them white boys threw eggs at her,” Miss Lillian, the salon owner, said, applying a thick white paste to my mother’s scalp.

My mother whipped her head around to look Miss Lillian in the eye to see if she was lying. All the children in the salon ducked as Jeri-Curl solution flew from my mother’s head and splattered on the walls.

“White people are just born evil,” another customer commented, without looking up from the pages of
Vogue
magazine. “I’m tired of this curl,” she continued. “Can you make my hair bone-straight, like hers?” she asked, holding up a photo of Christie Brinkley.

Getting your hair done was a half-day affair. While my mother waited for her turn under the circular hair dryer, I’d play with Alicia, the salon owner’s daughter.

“What would you do if white boys threw eggs at you?” Alicia asked me.

“Nobody is going to throw egg at me. My dad is white,” I said, obviously too young to be up on the Aryan Nation’s laws of racial purity. I was certain being half white was almost the same as being white. I knew I often endured some teasing that the white kids didn’t—the zebra name-calling, taunts about my hair feeling like a Brillo pad—but where I used to get upset, now I hid my anger and chalked it all up as an initiation. I convinced myself that the teasing had to stop one day, and after that I would be welcomed into the fold as an honorary white person. As bad as the ridicule got at times, watching the three black girls on the block who were never invited to play with the white kids helped keep me from crying or running home and telling my parents every time someone started teasing me.

Jacqui, Kim, and Lisa always played on the sidewalk right in front of one another’s houses, as if there were an invisible fence preventing them from going into the street or around the corner. When my white friends weren’t outside—usually when they were at a party I wasn’t invited to or went down to the Jersey Shore with their moms—I’d join the three black girls. Playing with them was the only time my two black Barbies came out of their motor home. (Who said black people don’t like camping?)

I’d made the mistake of bringing a black Barbie out to play with the white girls once, but they treated her like dirt, like she was Scurvy Barbie.

“Ewww! That’s not Barbie,” Michelle said, backing her Western Barbie away. I agreed with Michelle, and not just because she was the queen of the pack. Anyone who watched television could tell Black Barbie wasn’t as important as White Barbie. White Barbie dominated the commercials: She was the one cruising the coast in a Corvette; she was the one taking the elevator to the second floor of the Dream House. Black Barbie appeared only in a still shot behind White Barbie for about two seconds before the commercial faded to black.

With Michelle and the gang looking on to see how I would handle ousting Black Barbie, I had Skipper tell Black Barbie she couldn’t play with the group, and then I threw her back into her motor home.

Soon after benching Black Barbie, I learned that black friends were also to be played with only in secret. Once, I walked to the schoolyard with Jacqui, the only black girl from my block who went to St. Irenaeus.

Jacqui usually sat on the steps alone, but this time I sat down with her. Michelle noticed us and motioned me over with her finger. “Why are you sitting there?” she asked, her voice full of irritation.

“Because I walked with her this morning.”

“Don’t play with her,” Michelle said, offering no further explanation as she pulled me by the arm toward the group of white kids. “If you play with her, you can’t play with us.”

I walked away and left Jacqui sitting in the grass while the white kids played around her and almost through her, not even apologizing when a Nerf ball hit her on the head.

Back in the beauty salon, the same conversations that clued me in on the benefits of segregation also let me know that, despite what my mother said to me in private about people being equal, she knew it wasn’t really the case. Once, she’d laughed with her friends as she recounted how she almost got into a fistfight with a woman over a Cabbage Patch doll.

“The white women wanted Cabbage Patch dolls so bad, they were even grabbing the black ones!”

I took that to mean that white women didn’t usually want black dolls. Black dolls were somehow not as good as white ones.

That same day, Alicia was getting her first relaxer. Her mother, Miss Lillian, complained about the hassle of dealing with such a tumbleweed of hair every morning and used the same words to describe Alicia’s hair as the white girls used to tease me about mine: bad, thick, nappy. After Alicia’s mother put the chemicals on her hair, she undid one of my two braids and pulled her fingernails through the tight curls above the back of my neck.

“She should get a relaxer, too,” Miss Lillian advised my mother. “She has some tough, thick hair back in this kitchen,” she said, painfully pulling on my tangled curls.

“She has that good hair; it’s probably too delicate for a perm,” another customer replied.

“Yeah, I wouldn’t put that in her hair,” my mother agreed.

Alicia winced in pain and screamed for her mother to rinse the burning perm solution out of her hair. I was horrified but at the same time grateful that my half-white side saved me from being lumped with the black people. I became determined to use that side as an all-access pass to the world of real Barbies and pain-free hair for as long as I could.

Every two weeks as my mother got her hair curled, the stories of racial clashes became more violent. Black people who ventured into the wrong neighborhoods were getting egged, along with a side order of ass-kicking.

“Li’l Man said those white boys tried to stab him!” Miss Lillian announced.

“Miss Jessie is now carrying mace in her purse!” another woman added.

“I’m telling you, someone is really going to get hurt,” Miss Lillian said.

“If I need to go through the white neighborhoods, I always wear my uniform,” one lady said, fingering her U.S. Postal Service hat. “Them white boys don’t mess with me. They know I won’t deliver their mothers’ welfare checks!”

“I’ve been through the sixties. No white boys are going to stop me from shopping!” my mother yelled from under the hair dryer.

And my mother meant it. I was terrified for her as she dragged me along to Talluto’s, an Italian deli right on the corner of where Miss Lillian said a guy threw a pumpkin at her on Halloween. My mother had been faithful to Talluto’s ever since my paternal grandmother died. Up until her death, my grandmother insisted I get to know my Sicilian roots and eat only the best pasta and pizza sauce.

Two days after some white teenagers firebombed an interracial couple’s house on the same block as Talluto’s, my mother still insisted on shopping there.

Every night, we saw Talluto’s at the beginning of the evening as Channel Six started off the local newscast with colorful graphics and a play on fire words: Racial Tensions Heat Up!

“Mom, these people want to kill you!” I warned her when she was getting out of the car to buy pizza sauce.

“Angela, the police car is sitting right there,” my mother said, and she pointed to a cruiser that was stationed at the end of the block to keep the peace. That made me even more jittery, but I got out of the car thinking I could protect my mother with my half-white powers if someone tried to set her on fire. Fortunately, I never had to test my powers out, but I often wonder what we looked like to other people. What did they think of the black mother pulling her child through a race-riot zone to buy pizza?

My mother wouldn’t be contained by racial tensions, but the more they grew, the more she contained my play boundaries. I received a bike for my birthday, but it was more like a museum piece than a toy. I couldn’t ride it more than two feet. The day my father took the training wheels off, my mother brought me onto the front porch and outlined my safe area. “Angela, your field of play is here and here,” she said, circling our block and the block across the street with her finger. “You cannot go there, there, there, or there,” she said, circling everywhere else.

Jacqui was watching as my mother reiterated my play boundaries.
I knew you’d be joining me again sooner or later,
her eyes seemed to say, as my mother drew another invisible X over the field of grass that separated our block from the all-white neighborhoods.

I still refused to join Jacqui and her friends—not after Michelle’s threats of ousting me from the white group. I sat on my steps ignoring the black girls as my white friends cycled by, playing cards flapping from the spokes in their back wheels.

“Hey! Wanna play Barbies?” I called out to them as they zoomed past me, my feet firmly planted on the very edge of my mother’s outlined boundaries. “Wouldn’t it be fun to sit on my steps and play?” They ignored me.

Instead of playing outside, I spent the next few days in the mirror, analyzing what parts of my body I would have to change to be fully accepted by the white people. My lips should be a little bit smaller. I sucked them in. My nose should have more of a point, I thought, and pushed it together with my hands. I did get a little bit lighter from being inside so much, but it wasn’t enough. My boundaries stayed the same.

I went back outside and decided that playing by myself was the best thing to do. I’d throw a Frisbee, chase it, and throw it again, laughing loudly enough for Jacqui to hear.
I don’t need you; look at
how much fun I’m having playing schizophrenic Frisbee! Ha ha ha!

Finally, boredom set in, and it was just as strong as half-white pride. I slunk up to the black girls. Even after my multiple shameful refusals to play with them, I was warmly welcomed back into the fold and shown how many games one can play within ten feet of sidewalk space.