One day, a few months into my seventh-grade year, I walked into the gym and sat at the top of a small cluster of my classmates in the bleachers. There were four girls, all sitting with their knees together, all wearing khaki shorts and loose pastel shirts. I watched the other kids playing dodgeball on the court, hurling balls, intending to hurt. Barbara was idly twisting her blond hair: her roots were black. She turned in her seat to look at me.
“Why don’t you put some nigger braids in my hair?”
“Excuse me?” I said. “What did you say?”
“Nigger braids. Why don’t you put my hair in nigger braids?”
I hadn’t misheard her. Barbara smiled, satisfied as an animal that’s eaten its fill, and turned back to watch the games on the court. The heat in the gym was unbearable. I stood up and descended the bleachers, hoping I wouldn’t trip. I couldn’t believe she’d said the word, used it so casually, so denigratingly, and then been so proud of what she’d done. Casual racism was so prevalent in my school, yet encountering it often didn’t make it any easier to understand. It was incomprehensible to me. I didn’t know how to react to it. There were so many Black kids in public school that I could always rely on someone else to fight, to yell out honky and beat the shit out of the offending party. A few years later, my brother and his cohort would sneak knives and brass knuckles into school to fight White kids who wore rebel flag T-shirts, who initiated confrontations informed by race, by the word nigger hurled like a large rock. But at Coast Episcopal, I was alone. And the torments I’d suffered in Gulfport and public school continued, except at my private school, my brown skin was an actual physical indicator of my otherness. There was no need for me to justify my misery by imagining that others saw my sense of inner weakness, saw it as other, and picked on me for it; at my private school, the color of my skin was enough of a signal for some of my schoolmates to see inferiority, weakness.
I was alone later in the year when I stopped in the hallway during a break. A group of White boys, all juniors and seniors, stood in the foyer opposite me, loitering. They were uniformed in khaki and polos, and they were all at least a foot taller than I was. They were also laughing at a joke one of them must have told when I walked by. I stopped to look at them, me with my thin shins, unmuscled calves, a collarbone like a crowbar, my serious dusky face marked by a down-turned mouth that didn’t like to smile since my protruding front teeth marked me as different in yet another way. My mother could not afford braces for me.
“What did you say?” I asked them. They chuckled.
“You heard,” one of them said. His name was Phillip, and my mother cleaned for his family once a month. They always sent us the largest garbage bags of clothing.
“No, I didn’t.”
“You know what we do to your kind,” another laughed.
“No, I don’t.”
They laughed again, each of them elbowing the other, and then I knew. Whatever the joke, it involved a Black person, hands bound, and a choking rope at the neck, a picnic. Lynching. They were joking about lynching.
“You ain’t going to do shit to me,” I said. I said it before I could think that I was one and they were many, and there was no one to help me fight my battle.
Phillip and his friends changed then. They shifted and stopped laughing. One of them crossed his arms, and then another, and they looked as if they could move like a herd.
Even though my heart felt as if it would beat its way out of my chest, I stood. I was sweating and my face burned, but I stood.
“You ain’t going to do nothing,” I said.
They saw I would not move. They watched my eyes, perhaps wanting me to cry. I didn’t. The moment passed. They shrugged, walked past me down to the senior lockers. I watched them go. After they disappeared, I watched my classmates in the student lounge, sliding drinks across the table to one another, eating pizza, chewing and talking. I felt victorious for one moment, proud that I’d stood up for myself. But as I watched my schoolmates, their shining faces and white, wide smiles, separated by the glass between us, I realized I’d achieved nothing. I was still myself. I was still alone.
My mother drove us to visit our father in New Orleans on weekends in her small, rattling Toyota Corolla. Charine invariably sat in the front seat while the rest of us sat in the back. Sometimes we sang along to the radio, and when we did, my mother told us to shut up and let the radio sing. She had no patience, and I imagine it was because she drove and her children sang and all she could think about was our father and the fact that she had never wanted to be a mother in this situation. By this time Joshua was taller than me by at least two inches, and wider. Nerissa was a premature beauty. Charine was small, skinny, and funny. In the backseat, Josh and I would tussle with our elbows, each of us fighting for room by leaning forward and smashing the other person’s arm into the seat. I usually lost because he was bigger and stronger than me; at the time, I was beginning to realize that all the dominance I’d exercised over him while we were growing up was fading. The trunk was even more crowded with paper bags filled with groceries; even when we weren’t with her, my mother took responsibility for feeding us. She knew my father’s refrigerator held only condiments. She packed easy things to cook, things she thought we could handle: Top Ramen noodles, tuna fish, eggs, boxes of Tuna Helper, sandwich bread, peanut butter and jelly, cereal, and gallons of milk. During the summer, when we stayed with my father for a week at time, we’d run through the food, so at the end we were eating dry cereal out of the box for breakfast and lunch, and inventing things for dinner.
“I’m hungry,” Nerissa said.
“Are you hungry too?” I asked Charine.
Charine nodded, hopping in front of a large mirror my father’d set against a wall in the living room. She was preening. My father, as usual, wasn’t home. He wasn’t next door at his fourth baby mama’s apartment, either. We didn’t know where he’d gone. He did that often, leaving us alone in the apartment while he disappeared. I worried about him, but I knew that eventually, sometime later that night, he’d be back. I was accustomed to being in charge when my mother was gone or working, so I took it as my obligation. Of course I had to feed us.