She grunts and groans, and I hold back a little so as not to make much noise. So many ways to nearly disappear. I’ve tried them all, over the years. Dressing like everyone else. Hugging corners. Staying home. I remember sitting for an hour at a time in a bathroom stall in junior high school, because that was the only place I could escape the teasing. I’d made the mistake once, in seventh grade, of bringing home a friend; the next day, it was all over schooclass="underline" “You won’t believe it! Her mama’s black! She looks white, sort of, but she’s a Negro, all right, you can tell up close. Fat lips, flat nose.” In ninth grade, Troy Jones, my first crush, somehow hadn’t heard the talk. We hung out together at lunch, eating sandwiches and apples under an oak tree just outside the cafeteria. He was a merit scholar and an athlete, tall and muscular, a honeyed, varnished color. His father was the first black banker I’d met. Troy told me up front he didn’t want to date me because I looked too much like a boy — thin, no hips, no breasts to speak of (that hasn’t changed). But he liked me “as a friend.”
One day I told him what I knew about my family, hoping he might date me if he thought I was more like him. He stood, bread crumbs spilling from his pants, pulled me up beside him, and walked around me slowly, rubbing his chin, saying, “Mmm-hmmm. Mmm-hmmm.” He ran a finger down my arm, my back, across the flat cotton bra beneath my blouse. Finally, he stepped back. “Girl, you telling me you’re a nigger?”
When I didn’t answer and began to cry, he dropped the jive act. He hugged me. “You must really be confused.” No one had said this to me before — no one had understood it — and I cried even harder. Later that day, after classes, he caught me in the hallway. “Here,” he said. “I have something for you.” He handed me a paperback copy of Claude Brown’s Manchild in the Promised Land, with a picture of Harlem on the cover. “This will tell you who you are.”
“What is it?”
“Brother tells it straight, growing up black in white America. This is your heritage, girl.”
For the next week I tried to read the book, but I didn’t see myself in it anywhere. Claude Brown was writing about the North. The East. Most of all, he was writing about being a man. In one passage, he talked about going away to college and partying for the first time with white women. “I never would have thought that white girls could be so nice,” he said. “Cats could look all up under their dresses and everything, and all they did was laugh.”
One day I told Troy I didn’t understand this bit about the kitties. He laughed so hard he nearly choked on his sandwich. “Cats. You know, guys. Fellas. Dudes.”
“They go to college so they can look up white girls’ dresses?”
“The girls don’t mind, see. That’s the point.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“No no no. See, since slavery times, the black man has been lynched and shit for even looking at white girls funny. Claude’s saying this is the white man’s insecurity, ‘cause the girls themselves, they get a kick from it.
“I’m sorry, I don’t believe that.”
“You’re not reading ideologically, Telisha. Smartly. Maybe I should have started you with Frantz Fanon. He’s all about the mind-set, see, how the mind-set of the perennially oppressed — ”
“I don’t like it when somebody looks up my dress.”
“Telisha — ”
“Well, I don’t!”
Exasperated, he grabbed his lunch sack. “That’s ‘cause you’ve been raised a proper white bitch. Grow up.”
I wanted to tell him he’d just proven the falsity of Claude Brown’s passage, but he’d already stalked away.
In high school, I tried consciously to embrace my blackness. This was difficult in Dale Licht’s house (“You married him for his home and his money!’ I used to scream at Mama, and we’d both collapse in tears). Each Wednesday night he’d take us to his country club for steaks and baked potatoes. He’d chat with his weekend golfing buddies, Mama would make several trips to the bathroom — to see if she could still pass for white, I accused her — and I watched the black waiters bring us our food, yes sir-ing, yes ma’am-ing to and from the kitchen.
Among the lawyer set in Dallas, the moneyed folks, mixed-race marriages were less rare than I would have thought, and I could almost believe that color was less and less a problem all the time. But then, on any given day in the hallways at school, I’d hear light-skinned blacks taunt their darker friends until the friendships blew apart in rage and recrimination, and I realized it was a mistake to relax too much.
On some Wednesdays I’d bring a book of poetry with me to the country club, Maya Angelou, Nikki Giovanni, Ntozake Shange, but Dale would always say, “Put that away, Tish. Sit up, now, and eat your dinner.”
“My name is Telisha. Don’t whiten it.”
“Hush now. Put your napkin in your lap. Use your fork on those peas, not your knife.”
So I’d read the books at school, hiding in a bathroom stall. I loved the poems but still didn’t find myself in any words I saw. My blood may have been black, but my skin didn’t let on, and Mama had whisked me, early, from the only black community I’d ever known. I was living now in an all-white Dallas suburb. Shange didn’t have nothing to say ‘bout that. I ached for Ariyeh, then. She had been dark as the back of a closet, as a kid. She could teach me something about myself, I thought. But Mama had made it clear we were to have nothing more to do with our Houston kin.
Maybe if I learn black women’s history, I reasoned, I’ll discover a tradition I can respond to. But even the driest books in our school library crumbled into stereotypes: “Mammy reflected two traditions perceived as positive by Southerners — that of the idealized slave and that of the idealized woman.”
And this, from an essay entitled “The Life Cycle of the Female Slave,” sillier than Claude Brown — the lines so astonished me, I committed them to memory, word for word: “Most slave girls grew up believing that boys and girls were equal. Had they been white and free, they would have learned that women were the maidservants of men.”
Thank God we didn’t grow up white and free, or we’d have thought men were better than we were? After reading the lines a dozen times, I tore the essay up and flushed it, piece by piece, down the john.
Water gurgles through pipes. Wet, wheezing sighs. The brandy woman paws a roll of toilet paper, pulls up her stockings, flushes. I can feel her chill through the metal stall partition. Water splashes in the sink, a compact clicks, lips smack; the door eases shut. For several minutes, I linger until I’m sure she’s gone.
Earl and his mates have given the floor to a new guitarist, “Bayou Slim,” who has just walked in the door “hauling a scuttery-looking old Gibson and a tiny Fender amp,” Bitter says. The man is ravaged, wraithlike, wearing a straw cowboy hat and sharecropper clothes: blue denim shirt and faded overalls. Drunk or doped, he prances about in small, spasmodic jerks, a Stepin Fetchit caricature. He assaults his guitar, making it snap and clatter. Voice like a wall falling down. The chords pierce my ears, as painful as the splinter in my thumb.
“Poor old soul,” Bitter says. Earl and the others sit, patiently, while Slim gyrates and wails. The crowd ignores him, mostly, though quietly and politely. I wiggle the splinter and finally pull it out just as Slim reaches a shrieking climax. He drops to his knees, shaking and sweating, then tugs off his hat, offers it like an alms bowl around the room, dragging his guitar behind him. People fill the hat with coins.