“Fuckers,” I found myself saying. I picked Mary-Emma up just to hold her, letting the wagon roll slightly away and bang into a parking meter. She was so swaddled in her giant slippery snowsuit that I could hardly hang on to her. But I carried her into the coffee shop we happened to be near and sat her on the couch by the gas fireplace and unzipped her snowsuit to warm her there. The log was fake and the fire rolled around it blue and cold as water — an ornamental fountain more than a hearth. Mary-Emma’s hair was damp and pressed to her head. Well, I would get her some hot chocolate. “Foggers,” she said to me, and then we both laughed. “Don’t say that, though,” I added, in warning.
“Oh, my God!” cried Sarah. “Oh, my God, oh, my God. That’s it, that’s it.” She began pacing around the kitchen after I told her what had happened. I did not repeat the actual word that My-kull had said but just used the phrase “the n-word.” I was holding Mary-Emma, who was playing with my hair, lifting it up and then letting it fall in my face, laughing when I would blow on it and make it move.
Sarah continued. “My God! Who knew this was possible in this city? At the little folk music festivals in the county parks in summer you see all kinds of mixed-race families. I thought this was the perfect town … OK, not perfect, but I thought this was the best possible situation for Emmie. I thought we would not be letting her down by bringing her here, and now I see my own naïveté.” The finger-raking of her hair, which had become familiar to me, began now with two hands.
“Perhaps if you are black, there is nowhere, really,” I said, thinking of the boy in Sufism, and Sarah just stared at me.
“I’m forming a support group. Don’t laugh.”
But I wasn’t laughing.
“I’m going to use the very mechanisms of this town against it — this goddamn self-satisfied town that …”
“That drinks its own bathwater!” I said, borrowing a Dellacrosse expression for Troy. It was a metaphor and not a metaphor and is what the outlying areas of the state all felt: that Troy was a piece of smug, liberal, recycling, civic-minded monkey masturbation. That it was gestural, trying to make itself feel good — which in Dellacrosse meant “better than everyone else.” That it wasn’t real. That was the true crime. Its lack of reality. Whatever that meant. Also, once a year some rural girl came to Troy for the weekend, drank too much, and ended up raped and beaten to death in some apartment or park.
Sarah looked at me with sudden searching concentration. It was a look I was coming to know and it was one I felt inside of me often, a feeling of aghast but childlike scrutiny: it said, Why are there more space aliens on this planet than there used to be? Or are we the space aliens and are the human beings, uh-oh, coming back?
“Yes,” she said slowly, then picked up speed as if snapping herself out of a daze. “Well, I guess all towns sort of drink their own bathwater. But they don’t all have cruelty-free tofu! I’m going to get a support group going, and I’m going to bring families of color into this home, and we are going to discuss things and pool our strengths and share our stories and plot our collective actions and all that shit. Would you supervise the children?”
“What children?” I knew that the owner of the Moroccan restaurant on Wendell had children. Would they come? Last October someone had shot up the restaurant sign with actual bullets, then ripped it off and rebolted it upside down.
“The hypothetical children. The ostensible children. The imagined children. That kind.” She smiled.
“Sure,” I said.
“Tassa hair up ’n’ down,” said Mary-Emma, still playing with it as if it were silky string.
And so the weekly meetings got their start. Every Wednesday evening I would be upstairs with the children: Mary-Emma, two four-year-olds named Isaiah and Eli, a five-year-old named Althea, and a girl named Tika, who was eight and who sometimes helped me with the little ones and other times just sat in a corner and read Harry Potter. Often other families would make an appearance: an Ethiopian doctor and her sons, a seventh-grade boy named Clarence and a fourth-grader named Kaz. There was an Adilia, a Kwame, and more. They were mostly “of color,” as was said by all the adults downstairs, a range of shades from light to dark, though most of the parents downstairs, I noted, were white. Most were the transracial, biracial, multiracial families Sarah and Edward knew thus far in Troy, and probably more would be recruited. Upstairs I built Lego forts with the kids, or thought up little hiding games or wrestled or sang. Their voices were boisterous and fun and, being kids, they had their own words: “Nanana-booboo, you can’t catch me,” they would tease one another. The way in which the play-taunts of children resembled the calls and cries of animals was interesting to me. Only once did Sarah summon me downstairs to help her make a quick emergency dessert for the group: we microwaved the peach baby food and spooned it as hot puree over ice cream. “We used to eat this in Dellacrosse all the time,” I said, changing the facts slightly.
“Really!” said Sarah.
“Yes. Sort of. It was better than some old raisin cream pie — pudding and pits we called that pie.”
“Pits?”
“My mom always bought cheap raisins with the stems still on and poking out.” I continued dripping the hot peach liquid on the little scoops of ice cream, which had been dug out of the carton with a melon baller. Naked, they looked ready for ping-pong.
Everyone, except the children, exclaimed over the dessert’s deliciousness.
“You can just eat the ice cream,” I told the kids upstairs.
And amid the shared stories of public school biases and gang statistics and the strange comments of acquaintances, remarks would waft up through two floors, out of interest and earshot for the kids, but if I strained I could hear.
“… and I walked into the school for the conference and there was the teacher shaking Kaz and banging his head against the wall …”
“… institutionalized bigotry can subtly convince you of its rightness. With its absurdity removed, its evil can compel …”
“And even the adults pat her hair as if it’s the funniest thing they’d ever seen on a mammal … and of course available for public patting, like a goat in a zoo …”
“There’s a great woman on the south side who does hair …”
“Of course homework is just a measure of the home! And so the kids of color will always fall behind …”
“The African-American peer group is the strongest and the Asian-American is the weakest — that is, Asian-American parents have power that African-American parents do not.”
“School is white. And school is female. So it’s the boys of color who have the hardest time, and if they’re not into sports the gangs will lure them in …”
“I guess we sort of knew that already, but still.”
“It’s all so unfair.”