Authors: Helen Oyeyemi
“Me too,” he said. “We’d better talk.”
In his mind he was no more colored than I was; he’d never even met his grandparents or cousins, his parents were the only ones from their families who’d decided to move north from Louisiana and see if anyone called them out on their ancestry. His father had stood in line behind a colored man at the front desk of the Flax Hill Country Club and eavesdropped as the colored man tried and failed to gain membership. “We’re fully subscribed,” the colored man was told. But Gerald Whitman was offered a membership form to fill out without further ado. It was too bad for the other guy, but Gerald liked golf and didn’t see why he shouldn’t play it in those surroundings if he could get
away with it. Gerald had thought:
Well, what if I just don’t say . . . what if I never say?
He’d passed that down to Arturo, the idea that there was no need to ever say, that if you knew who you were then that was enough, that not saying was not the same as lying. He asked me a question that threw me into confusion because I couldn’t honestly answer yes or no. He asked if I’d have married him if I’d seen him as colored.
“And Julia?”
“Mom says as soon as she saw Joe and Agnes Miller she knew they were the same as her and Dad. You should have seen how long their faces were at the wedding—Mom’s face, Dad’s face, Agnes’s face, Joe’s. But Snow turned out to be . . . Snow, and we got to go on not saying.”
Snow was blameless. And Arturo was forgivable; maybe because he said that he felt that Bird was his, ours, in a way that he hadn’t felt with Snow. He said that for a long time he’d looked at Snow and seen her as Julia’s child. Snow’s beauty had seemed so strange to him for a while, so blank, like a brand-new slate. But Bird looked up at him confidingly, in a way that made him grin. “This kid is pretty sure we’re old friends.”
It was Olivia Whitman I could not forgive. When Bird and I came home, she was our first visitor, and she took one look at Bird, a cold, thorough look, then turned her gaze away. “Well, she’s healthy, thank God.” She then began to insinuate that I’d two-timed Arturo and gave me to understand I had another thing coming if I expected Arturo to raise another man’s child. I said: “You think I won’t slap you, Olivia, but I will. Keep going and you’ll see.”
Next she implied that my background was questionable. She didn’t know where I was really from, she hadn’t met my father, she’d taken everything I said on trust.
“Nice try, but I’m not going to stand here while a colored woman tries to tell me that maybe I’m the one who’s colored.”
I sat down with Bird, who wailed because she preferred me to stand. Olivia sat down too, on the same couch, but leaving a large space between us. Now that I knew about her it was incredible that I hadn’t seen it before. Or had I? Tea with her and Agnes and Vivian had made me think of Sidonie; it hadn’t just been my mind wandering.
“The last person who threatened to slap me was a white woman. Blonde, like you. No Southern belle, either. Just trash.”
“I guess that’s how we operate.”
I told myself,
Stop it. Whatever else she says, don’t rise to it.
I wanted a grandmother for Bird. Olivia wasn’t the one I would have chosen, but she was a generous grandmother to Snow and if she put her mind to it, she could do it again. Bird was beautiful too, with her close curls and her bottomless eyes, and she was only just getting started.
“I was working at a grocery store,” Olivia said. “And I didn’t fetch a box of soap flakes down fast enough for that woman’s liking, so she said: ‘I’ll slap you, girl.’ ‘I’ll slap you, girl’ to a grown woman. And I knew I’d lose my job if I went at her, so I just said: ‘I’m sure you’ve got a lot of things to do, ma’am, and I’m as stupid as they come. Please be patient with me.’ That was standard, that kind of cringing and crawling. I didn’t want it to be. She was not my better, I don’t care what anyone says, she wasn’t. None of
them were. I thought:
If I have a daughter, I don’t want anyone talking to her like that. I don’t ever want to hear my daughter wheedling at anyone the way I do every working day
. I thought:
If I do, if I ever hear that in the voice of a child of mine, I’ll make her sorry all right. I’ll wring her damn neck.
Couldn’t very well wring my own neck, could I?”
Olivia’s voice was very calm, but her hands trembled. I backed up, moved farther away so that Bird and I were pressed against the arm of the sofa. I didn’t think she was going to lash out. No, I wanted to keep us from catching what was in her, what was there in her voice and her eyes. But babies have some unfathomable criteria for what they consider attractive. Bird was wriggling like crazy. Her intuition should’ve told her that Olivia was terrible, just the worst, but I was having trouble keeping the kid from stretching her hands out in Olivia’s direction. I don’t know, maybe she already had expensive tastes and liked the scent Olivia was wearing.
“What you don’t understand is that we’re being kept down out there. All the way down. In my town you couldn’t vote unless you passed a literacy test. How does that stop colored folks from voting, you ask? You didn’t see what the colored school was like, how big the classes were. The teachers did what they could, but half my male cousins could hardly read. They lost patience before the girls did. No matter how literate a colored man was, there was always some excuse to whip him. There were other things too. Little things. You’d save up and go out for a nice night at a nice place, all right, fine. All the high-class places we were allowed to go to, they were imitations of the places we were kept
out of—not mawkish copies, most of it was done with perfect taste, but sitting at the bar or at the candlelit table you’d try to imagine what dinnertime remarks the real people were making . . . yes, the real people at the restaurant two blocks away, the white folks we were shadows of, and you’d try to talk about whatever you imagined they were talking about, and your food turned to sawdust in your mouth. What was it like in those other establishments? What was it that was so sacred about them, what was it that our being there would destroy? I had to know. I broke the law because I had to know. Oh, only in the most minor way. Gas station restrooms when Gerald would drive me cross-state on vacation—one day I used the White Only restroom and nobody noticed me. Gerald begged me not to, but I just got my compact out, repowdered my face, and walked in. I felt like laughing in all their faces. The rest room experience is more or less the same, in case you were wondering.”
“Olivia,” I said. “Look at Bird. Look at her.” I drew the baby blanket down a little so that Olivia could really see her. But the woman just wouldn’t look, and it broke my heart.
“Every now and then there’d be a colored cleaning lady in there, in the White Only restroom, I mean, scrubbing a washbasin that nobody was using right then. And she’d look at me and know, and I’d look at her. They didn’t do anything or say anything, those cleaning ladies, but for hours and hours afterward I’d just want to pull all my skin right off my body. So I said to Gerald: We’ve got to go north, let people take us how they take us, then we won’t feel like we’re betraying anybody. But it’s the same thing over here. Same thing, only no signs. The places you
go to, do you see colored people there? Let me answer that for you. You see them rarely, if at all. You’re trying to remember, but the truth is they don’t exist for you. You go to the opera house and the only colored person you see is the stagehand, scattering sawdust or rice powder or whatever it is that stops the dancers slipping . . . folks would look at him pretty hard if he was sitting in the audience, they’d wonder what he was up to, what he was trying to be, but being there to keep the dancers from slipping is a better reason for him to be there, he’s working, so nobody notices him but me. Listen, I love that Grand Theater down in Worcester and I love all that dancing I see there, been there at least once a year for the past . . . oh, how old is that son of mine . . . for the past thirty-seven years or so. Almost forty years! But sometimes right in the middle of the second act my vision darkens just like a lantern shade’s been thrown over it, and the dancers are colored, every shade, from bronze to tar, and every hand touching strings in the orchestra is colored too, and the tops of their heads are woollier than sheep, and the roses in my lap, the ones I throw to the prima ballerina at the end, even the petals of those roses are black, burnt black. And then I think, Well, it’s out, the truth is out . . .”
She glanced at Bird. “This one’s dark like my eldest, Clara. See if Clara will take her.”
—
i said i didn’t care
that Bird was colored. I said that to Mia, and to Webster, and to Mrs. Fletcher, who replied: “That’s the spirit. Keep saying it until it’s true.”
Nothing got past Mrs. Fletcher. It’s true that it was hard. Olivia and Gerald attended Bird’s christening, and Gerald kissed her, but Olivia didn’t. And it was hard to take Bird for walks, pushing her stroller around town, and watch people’s faces when they saw her. I saw them deciding that if Arturo meant to claim her as his daughter then they weren’t going to contradict him. Once I passed Sidonie and Merveille, deep in conversation, the daughter pushing her mother’s wheelchair, and I almost escaped them, but Merveille instructed Sidonie to bring her up to the stroller so she could bless the baby. Merveille invited me to coffee when she found out I’d lied about being Sidonie’s teacher, and it was excruciatingly awkward for the first half hour or so. I felt sick about having lied to her; there are people it’s a bad idea to tell the truth to, but never Merveille. She didn’t have to set me at ease—not by any means—but she did, by telling me about her grudging respect for Olivia Whitman. She said Olivia’s “masquerade” had been ugly, but that she couldn’t help but appreciate a woman with sangfroid. “Let us say that means ‘cold blood.’ No—nerve is what she has. Nerve.” It turns out Olivia respects Merveille Fairfax too, because of the stink she raised over a decade ago about Flax Hill’s colored children having to go to a separate school when it was their right by law to be educated alongside their white peers. Apparently Merva got up a letter-writing campaign,
The Boston Globe
ran an editorial piece about the situation, and the school board gave in under the pressure. Olivia said most people weren’t overtly against joining the schools, more people than she expected were in favor of it, but a few called Merva bad names in the street and asked her if she
thought her daughter was too smart for the colored school. And Merva smiled and said: “Every single child in this town is too smart for the colored school.” That put her on Olivia’s list of people not to trifle with.
I looked at the sky while Sidonie and Merveille gasped and cooed over Bird, so I didn’t see their expressions. But when they finally let me go on my way, Sidonie put her hand on my shoulder, and that hurt me all the way home.
Yes, it was hard. Snow would place a finger on each of Bird’s palms and raise her little hands up when they closed into fists. She’d say: “I’m your best friend, Bird.” Bird seemed to understand and believe this, and her eyes searched for her sister when she was away. Bird adored Snow; everybody adored Snow and her daintiness. Snow’s beauty is all the more precious to Olivia and Agnes because it’s a trick. When whites look at her, they don’t get whatever fleeting, ugly impressions so many of us get when we see a colored girl—we don’t see a colored girl standing there. The joke’s on us. Olivia just laps up the reactions Snow gets: From this I can only make inferences about Olivia’s childhood and begin to measure the difference between being seen as colored and being seen as Snow. What can I do for my daughter? One day soon a wall will come up between us, and I won’t be able to follow her behind it.
Every word Snow said, every little gesture of hers made me want to shake her. Arturo told her I was just tired. It was true that I was up at whatever hour Bird chose. I rarely let him go to her instead. He got good at changing her diaper really fast, before I really noticed what he was doing. “You think I’m gonna let you
tell her I never helped out?” he said. Our daughter suckled so slowly, with the sucked-in cheeks of a wine-tasting expert. I’d nod over her while she fed, slipping in and out of sleep.
“Snow is not as wonderful as everybody thinks she is,” I said to Mia on the telephone, and my reflection smiled bitterly at me.
“What did she do?”
“Nothing yet. But I’m wise to her.”
Bird was napping in her crib, and I had to whisper so as not to wake her.
After a tense silence, Mia said: “I think you just need to rest, Boy.”
When I was pregnant and Olivia and I were still friendly, she told me that this would be the part of my life that brought me closer to my mother than ever, that this would be the time I felt what my mother had felt for me. Was this it? I’m learning that loving that kid as much as I do means that in some way we’re still not separate. I’m hungry when she’s hungry, and the cold hits me the same way it hits her, it makes me that much clumsier in scrambling to get us what we need.
I began to have dreams that made the ones I’d had about the rat catcher look like tea at the Ritz. I’d fall asleep and discover that I was Bird, my own little Bird. Snow being my big sister, that’s the bad dream. I’m the smaller girl and Snow has her arm around me, and she’s like a rose with a touch of dusk, so abundantly beautiful that it feels contagious—we’re touching, so . . .
“I’m your best friend, Bird,” Snow keeps saying, and it’s a hall of mirrors we’re walking down, and I don’t look the way I feel, I hate the mirrors but it’s okay as long as I just keep looking at her.
She’s laughing. She’s my best friend. There her arm is, around me, but the mirrors say I’m alone, that I haven’t got a sister, and Snow thinks it’s hilarious. I have to get away from her, there’s this terrible emptiness in the way she smiles and the words she keeps saying, I have to get away from her.
I don’t set too much store by dreams, but it’s probably unwise to ignore this kind. These are the kind of dreams that show you you’re not doing so well, that you haven’t accepted what you thought you’d accepted, that you’re a mess, lying there like you’ve been hit by a bus, your heart and mind standing over you tutting and trying to figure out what even happened, never mind fixing it.
This doesn’t feel like my life, it feels like somebody else’s. I’m standing here holding somebody else’s life for them, trying to keep it steady while it bobs up and down like a ferocious balloon. Make this little girl let me go—I don’t know if I want her.
Can’t I start over?