Ordinary Light A Memoir (N) (16 page)

After her lunch with my mother was over, I thanked Mrs. Nussbaum again for the gift, and I tried smiling more demurely so she wouldn’t be able to catch quite as firm a hold on my cheeks, though she managed to get in a good, long squeeze despite my efforts.

That evening, I said nothing about what was on my mind. I didn’t want my mother to take the book away from me, nor did I want reassurance of what it said. I wanted something I didn’t yet
know how to name—something I instinctively knew I ought not try to put into words. Some kind of crawl space that might provide me with an out, an alternate ending, a gentler version of God that didn’t make Him seem like He’d decided to turn on us so emphatically. What alarmed me most was sensing that it was a single “us” that the book of Revelation described, that Christians like me and Christians like the ones I instinctively disliked were thrown into the same unholy soup with people who denied God’s existence outright or who acknowledged it only with cool apathy.

Later that night, Wanda called from LA to wish Mom, Dad, Michael, and me a happy Valentine’s Day (Jean and Conrad were already away at school by then). When the receiver got handed to me, I told her about my fears. I must have chosen her because she was good at making light of things, was always just a movement away from laughter. Often her irreverence was frustrating. When I’d been littler, sometimes she’d held me on her lap and then, without warning, opened her knees wide and let me almost drop onto the floor, laughing at the shock and betrayal on my face. Sometimes she’d pinched me with her toes, giggling when my eyes filled up with water. But I also remember turning to her one night, when, despite eating my fill at dinner, I woke up hungry. I might have gotten scolded for coming back into the kitchen and asking to be fed; I knew better than to get up after I’d already been put to bed. So I’d found a way of getting Wanda’s attention, and she’d sat with me as I ate a packet of smoked almonds she’d dug out of her purse. I knew that Wanda was on my side, and I knew she believed in the Bible. She’d sought out a church to attend when she left for college. When she came back home for weekend visits, she helped out in the Sunday school classes at our church. Confronted with such an onerous text, Jean might have felt much like I did: afraid
and put off. Michael would likely have wanted to take advantage of my fears, turning my confidence into a prank he and his high school friends could capitalize upon. Even Conrad, whose college studies were aimed at staking out a place for himself in medicine, wouldn’t have had our eldest sister’s determination to quell my fears while also affirming God’s word.

So I told Wanda about the book of Revelation and about how anxious and afraid it made me. It was dark outside. The window gave back my own reflection in the kitchen light. Her voice was buoyant, bouncy. She said, “Don’t worry, Kitten. If it happens, it’ll be a total adventure.” That
it
meant everything, the whole apocalyptic chain of events.
It
was a lumping together of the good and the ghastly, a breezy, offhand dismissal of nuance.
It
lightened things for me, told me to let go of trying to plan for something so far-off and far-out. Not only did her
it
begin to yank me out of the spin cycle my thoughts had sucked me into, but her emphasis on the word
total
, and the drawn-out valley-girl inflection she’d adopted, also helped drain my thoughts of their dark hysteria. Wanda, the first of us to leave home, must have known about adventure. Sometimes, she brought girls home with her from college who told stories about hitchhikers or skiing accidents—girls with alcoholic sisters or dead parents. Girls who were kind and happy but who had also survived perilous things. Girls who had lived. “Wanda is my wanderer,” Mom would sometimes say. And that was what Wanda seemed to be striving for, with her sense of broad wonder, her appetite for anything. Perhaps she was right. Why shouldn’t I look forward to a chance at
total
adventure?

Hanging up the phone, I could feel my body begin to unclench in relief, and the first thing I remembered was the chocolates. I walked back over to the box, which I’d left on the coffee table atop
the
TV Guide
, and picked out a smooth round piece from the top layer. I bit down, expecting affirmation of my new, easier state of mind. To my intense disappointment, the candy was a cherry cordial, so hyperbolically sweet I sat there for a moment with the half-eaten morsel in one hand and the other hand cupped under my chin, trying to decide whether to spit the thing out.

—

No one else ever appears in my recurring dream about God and my family. The seven of us move around quietly, with a kind of nervous purpose, like the Jews hidden in the secret annex of the ten Boom sisters’ house. I’d always awaken before we could be found, before God could come to collect us and transport us to Heaven. In the dark center of night, hours from dawn, I’d lie still in bed, stranded, caught between competing currents of feeling: disbelief that salvation could really be as literal as all that and a strange, powerful nostalgia for the very years I was in the process of living, when the world of my family was the only heaven I needed to believe in.

BOOK A BIG BAND

“D
on’t you wish you were white?”

She was older than me. Tall and blond, with short hair like Julie Andrews’s. Her parents were downstairs talking to my parents, and when she asked me the question, which no one else had ever posed to me, she said it as if it was my chance to finally come clean. She was standing at the foot of my bed holding the Tuesday Taylor doll whose head spun around so that sometimes she could be a blonde and other times a brunette.

I knew instinctively that the answer must be “No,” which is what I told her.

“Really?”
she asked back. “Not even
some
times?” Her insistence told me she thought I was lying.

I didn’t give myself time to reflect because I had some sense of what was riding on my answer, but before I spoke, I let out a quick laugh intended to prove how silly, how utterly foolish she was to even ask.

“No. Never.” I picked up Christie, the black Barbie, and without trying to make a show of things, directed my most loving attention to her.

My friend was different suddenly in my eyes, meaner and brutish, though she meant as little harm as any of the other girls who, over the years, would relax enough to expose similar assumptions:
You’re not like other black people, are you? Can I touch your hair? If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?

When I told the story to my family over dinner, no one was surprised.

“
Do
you wish you were white?” my mother asked, and I told her that I didn’t, by then sure that I never had, that it would be foolish to wish myself into one of those girls with so little sense she thought she knew me better than I knew myself.

There were myriad versions of such girls, and I quickly learned to dread the moment when another friend would sign up for membership in the club. “Why don’t black girls like to get their hair wet?” someone would ask, and I’d beg her with all my silent might not to take another step down that path. Over time, I’d learn to insert my own ellipses into such conversations, letting things trail off before I had the chance to be held up like a specimen for examination.

In fourth grade, a boy named Archie Murdoch interpreted a necklace I was wearing as indication that I was open for business as an object of curiosity. The necklace was a hand-me-down from Conrad’s girlfriend, a string of ivory-colored beads made of carved Bakelite. It was the first time I’d worn anything so showy and ornamental, and I felt daintily refined. I carried that feeling with me onto the school bus, where I sat involuntarily straighter, elongating my neck to showcase my newly acquired beauty.

Archie must have caught some whiff of my pride as he boarded the bus, and it quickened him. Smiling or simply baring his teeth, he reached out to yank the necklace from my throat. “Who do you think you are?” he asked, laughing as the beads scattered across the school bus floor.

My chest clamped shut, and a few tears bolted out before I had a chance to will them back. I was crushed. I didn’t even have the wherewithal to lash out with one of the insults in current circulation, and perhaps it was just as well; surely the situation would
have called for something stronger. In my head, though I didn’t notice right away, he became a cruel version of one of those girls, the ones with all the questions, with the blinders they required someone’s fastidious help to remove, the ones who wittingly or not think it must be awful—quietly or glaringly or, in Archie’s case, criminally awful—being anything but what they are, anything but white.

Was that the kind of thing that happens whenever you’re black? Was it a mild, diluted version of what roamed about more brazenly in generations past? What about the other black kids at my school? Did they feel it? And if they did, why didn’t we ever talk about it? Were we afraid? Maybe it seemed shameful to admit that we lived in a world whose terms were defined by the people least like us. Was that a condition we in our silence had chosen? Was there even a choice to be made?

And what about my family? In making a choice to live where and how we did, had the seven of us split ourselves off from some key part of black reality? If not, why did it feel like a revelation every time Nella came through our door? And why should one black girl in a TV program that had been off the air for some time still stand out in my mind as distant kin, someone I longed to see again?

There was another thing complicating my sense of race. The best way I can name it is to relate a story my sister Jean used to tell sometimes about a black girl who used to bully her during seventh grade. This was back when my father was stationed at Langley Air Force Base, so let’s call the girl Virginia. I was only a baby when the story took place, but I’d heard it told so vividly in subsequent years that it had come to life for me, become one of my own stories.

“How come you talk so white?” Virginia would always ask,
bumping up wantonly against shy Jean, who hurried from her locker to her classrooms and back. What’s the right answer to a question like that? If Jean had asked our father, he’d have scoffed, saying there is no such thing as “talking white,” that speaking properly has nothing to do with race or even class but rather drive, intelligence, effort. He called people like Virginia
shiftless
. Perhaps one or two of my white friends, upon overhearing a question like that, would have thought a moment before replying,
Yeah, why
do
you talk like us?

“Shoot,” my father said sometimes, “those same people who fault you for speaking proper English are the first to complain,
‘Ooh, it’s because we black,’
whenever something doesn’t go their way.” There, he’d pause a moment in visible vexation, then huff aloud and spit out a word like
jokers
—or better yet
suckers
, with its lurid sibilants—in undisguised contempt. Our dad would have called Virginia
sorry
. He’d have said she was
sorry, up to no good, squandering her potential
.

But what made him so certain? He was raised in Sunflower, Alabama. Farm country. A speck on the map with its red clay roads, with its kids who’d have to take canoes to school when rain waters rose too high. His father and older brothers fought in France in World War II. Afternoons in the early 1940s, he used to spend time in his grandfather’s blacksmith shop, watching him forge tools out of molten iron. As a boy, my dad was entranced by the same books he later encouraged us to love, books by Poe, Stevenson, Sir Walter Scott. He drew and wrote poems. Once, he made county headlines for whittling a perfectly lifelike squirrel out of basswood. “Boy Carves Squirrel,” the rural paper had proclaimed. I never heard him complain about Jim Crow; it’s not that he hadn’t been affected by it, only that he refused to make it the cause of any significant
development in his life. When he left home to join the military, he said it was because he was “sick of the weather down south.” Even when he and my mother were turned away from the hotel where they’d planned to spend their honeymoon (“We had a reservation, but when the clerk saw us, he said they didn’t serve
Negroes
”), his frustration was derailed by his delight in being with his new bride. At least that’s the story he stood by for his children.

Looking at my father, with his handsome grace and his preternatural competence, I didn’t know how to argue with him, but then I’d think of Jean narrating the story of Virginia, the trauma not yet fully gone from her voice, and I knew there was more to it than that.

Jean never did anything to Virginia, but Virginia sensed something about Jean that she couldn’t let go of. Every time she’d accuse Jean of talking white, acting white, believing she was white, all Jean could do was whisper in her own defense, “No I don’t.”

One day, Virginia shoved up against Jean in the hall and challenged her to a fight. Wanda was already across town in high school, and Conrad was still in elementary, so Jean found herself completely alone. “Okay,” she said, finally owning up to the inevitability of the situation. “Today after school.”