Mixed: My Life in Black and White (10 page)

When we got into the car to leave, my mother thumbed through the introduction brochure. On the cover, there was a cartoon WELCOME BIRACIAL PARENTS! banner with six happy light-brown children standing under it.

“I’m looking for meat-and-potatoes talk and they’re serving up chips and soda,” my mother said, scanning the last page. “If those people think their mixed children aren’t black, they’ve got a rude awakening headed their way.” She tossed the pamphlet into the backseat where, after two weeks of lying abandoned in the hot sun, the brown cartoon children faded to white.

A few weeks later, as she was cleaning out her car, she found the brochure and laughed.

“You know what? You and me, we can be our own club.” She ripped up the faded children and replaced them with a Bible and a piece of kente cloth that sit in her car window to this day.

Fat Pam Is Real Black

“In America, which I love from the depths of my heart and soul, when you look like me, you’re black.”

—Colin Powell

My mother won’t come out of pocket for anything unless
it meets two conditions: high quality and low price. That’s all fine when you’re searching thrift-store racks for clothes, but a hard combination to find when you’re hiring an overnight babysitter.

Betty, our first sitter, didn’t like how watching two kids put a damper on her social life. Every weekend night, she’d drop my brother off with her cousin and take me out clubbing with her. Thanks to my steady diet of hormone-infused fast-food burgers, all it took was a low-cut top and some bright red lipstick to transform me from twelve to twenty-one.

Unfortunately, one morning my mother noticed the Club Passions VIP stamp on the back of my pubescent hand. She promptly fired Betty and walked me to the beauty salon, to see if anyone needed a babysitting gig.

“Fat Pam can watch her,” a fellow customer, Miss Cheryl, offered.

Miss Cheryl was Fat Pam’s mother. Like everyone else, Miss Cheryl called her daughter by her neighborhood name, so my mother wouldn’t confuse her with Booster Pam, the woman who would steal anything you wanted if you paid her half the item’s retail price.

My mother was sold on Fat Pam; she had a reputation around the beauty shop as a sweet, quiet girl. She wasn’t running the streets like some nineteen-year-olds; she had a steady man she was going to marry when she was done with community college. Fat Pam would also watch us for only $75 a week.

My brother and I soon discovered that Pam was sweet and quiet only after she smoked a bag of weed. Sometimes, she wasn’t even sweet and quiet then. If our upstairs neighbor was making too much noise while Pam was trying to relax in a weed-induced high, she’d make me and my brother chant “You’re fucking up my high!” while hitting the ceiling with brooms and mops. It was the most fun game Fat Pam ever played with us.

When she wasn’t high, she was Mean Pam. She was loud, she cursed like she was raised in a cell block, and she was quick to pick a fight, knowing that no one wanted to take on a three-hundred-pound woman. Mean Pam saw it as her job not only to babysit me but also to use her weight and her mouth to bully me into being a Real Black Person.

Pam’s Real Black Person Rules

Real Black People’s hair should be bone-straight or in a Jeri-Curl, no matter how many chemical burns it takes to get that way.

Real Black People accessorize with gold jewelry. The more jewelry men have, the more you should flirt with them. Women should have big gold hoop earrings to attract the men with the gold jewelry. If you can’t afford real gold, buy some fake earrings from a Chinese vendor and coat them in clear nail polish so they won’t turn green.

Real Black People never, ever listen to white music unless George Michael sings it.

Real Black People should know at least one break-dancing move.

Real Black People know how to fight.

Real Black People wear clean clothes and name-brand sneakers. If your sneakers get scuffed, you should throw them out.

Real Black People do not have white best friends.

“Like, omigod, it’s your friend Dara, like, on the phone,” Pam said, using her best imitation of a white-girl voice.

“Why is a white girl your best friend?” she asked me, after her intense staring forced me to cut my conversation with Dara short.

“Because she is,” I replied. I felt safe giving a flippant response. Pam had already smoked three joints and was floating on a cloud of drug tranquillity.

“You know you’re black, right?” Pam asked me, her tone implying that I didn’t. “If you don’t know now, you’re going to know when I get done with you.”

Pam’s community college was across the street from my school, which meant I had to endure two buses and a subway’s worth of Real Black Person notes.

“Real Black People use laundry tokens instead of subway tokens to pay the bus fare,” Pam said, before pocketing the money my mother had given me and slipping a Laundromat token into the fare box.

“C’mon, let’s go to the back,” Pam called out, once we were on the bus. “Real Black People sit in the back.”

When Pam walked me to school, she took great pains to point out people who were blacker than I was.

“See, she’s a Real Black Person,” Pam said, pointing to Tascha, a girl who sucked her teeth every time she saw me in the hallway. According to Tascha, I was a “light-skinned bitch.” At least, that’s what she called out to me a few times after sucking her teeth.

“Christina don’t like you either,” Tascha informed me, interrupting my walk from Science to Home Economics. “She says you be grittin’ on her too much,” Tascha continued, before she turned away from me and headed down the hall. “You do be grittin’ on people too hard,” she yelled over her shoulder. Of course, all the boys were looking when she said this. When Tascha walked, every male in the building stared, their eyes stuck on her perfect ass until the wavy logo of her Lee jeans back pockets turned the corner.

Christina and Tascha were unlike any girls I’d ever met. They were fourteen going on twenty-four. They went to Planned Parenthood after school and showed off their birth control pills in the cafeteria. They’d complain between classes about how most of the other black students at our school were childish and corny. If it was raining, I knew Tascha and Christina would show up with plastic caps and curlers so not one drop of water would mess up their sexy asymmetrical haircuts. I peered over their shoulders as they compared their Liz Claiborne purses and their gold name earrings and passed notes in their girly bubblescript handwriting. They always dotted their
i
’s with hearts. So yes, one could say I was grittin’ on Christina and Tascha, but it was with intrigue and admiration, the way you would stare at a celebrity.

“I told you black people don’t like to be stared at. You better watch out, they’re probably going to jump you,” Pam nonchalantly warned me after I asked her to check her Real Black Dictionary and tell me what
gritting
meant.

The knowledge that I was on the verge of getting my ass kicked only made me stare harder. I figured I had a reason to stare: I had to see if they were gearing up to slaughter me. I refused to get jumped unexpectedly.

I tried to delay the beatdown Pam predicted by becoming Christina and Tascha’s unwanted helper. I’d get in the dessert line at school, even though I didn’t want dessert; I wanted to call out Christina’s name when I hit the head of the line so she could get in front of me. I let Tascha borrow anything of mine she needed: my homework, my allowance, my gloves. Unfortunately, pushing myself on the girls only gave them more time to study me and find new things to hate.

“You talk white,” Christina said, after I let her borrow all my birthday money.

“She dresses white, too,” someone else yelled out.

“Why don’t you get a new hairstyle? You look like a DeBarge reject!” Tascha said, after I bought her Doritos.

If I’d known in eighth grade what I know now, I would have said, “Thank you, see you in twenty years, when you’re sitting with your ten kids and your biggest accomplishment was telling someone she talks white.” Maybe I’d have rejoined Dara at her table or at least saddled up with some of the “corny” black kids. I don’t know why I had this relentless drive to please my bullies. Perhaps it was because I was younger than everyone else and my mind wasn’t developed enough not to care what people thought; more likely it was because I was just doing what I could to keep the peace in one part of my life. Between Pam at home and the cool clique in school, all that teasing was wearing me down.

Pam instructed me that the way out of being teased was to vigorously study her Real Black People lessons.

“You have to learn to dance, learn to fight, and get some white Reebok high-top sneakers,” Pam instructed me, throwing away my supermarket loafers. The way Pam said it, white high-top Reeboks would be my talisman; once I secured a pair, I’d get the respect of Christina and Tascha. “Whatever you got to do to get your mom to buy them, do it,” Pam said. I knew I had to lie; my mother would rather bring George Bush as a date to her Black Panther reunion than buy name-brand sneakers.

I told my mother that high-top Reeboks were a Physical Education requirement. “Mr. Greer said I’ll break my ankle if I have the cheap shoes,” I said. My mom eyed me suspiciously, then told me to get in the car. “I have to see these special ankle-protecting sneakers,” she said when we pulled up to Foot Hut, our local Foot Locker knockoff.

“Fifty dollars? What are these shoes made of, gold?” my mother yelled out to the salesman, dropping the sample shoe like it was burning her hand. “Fifty dollars for sneakers? Do you know what I could do with fifty dollars?” she asked me.

“Buy me those sneakers so I won’t break my ankles?” I asked, knowing, of course, that wasn’t the right answer.

“How about I write Mr. Greer a note and tell him that my boss doesn’t pay me Reebok money. I’ll tell him I work in a hospital, so I can get you an ankle cast for free.”

We left Foot Hut and went down the street to Fayva, where we purchased their version of Reebok high-tops. “They look just like Reeboks,” my mother said. They did, except BALLOONS was stitched into the side where the Reebok logo was on the real high-tops. I knew going to school with fake Reeboks would be worse than going to school with no sneakers at all, so I spent two hours in my room using Wite-Out to carefully cover each letter of BALLOONS. When it dried, I took a thin black marker and stenciled REEBOK on top of the Wite-Out.

The next day, I proudly stomped my “Reeboks” through seven periods.
Look at me—I’m really black!
Every move I made was a ballet move; I didn’t turn corners, I pirouetted, raising my calf off the floor and rotating 90 degrees to make sure everyone caught a glimpse of my sneakers. The eighth and final period of the day, I shifted in my seat and jutted my legs out into the aisle so that Fred, a male member of the cool black clique, could have an unobstructed view of my feet.

“Look at her sneakers!” Fred whispered to Christina when our teacher, Mrs. Bratspir, was stuck on the wall phone, taking a note from the office.

Christina looked at my feet, and a shotgun blast of laughter burst out of her mouth.

As handy as Wite-Out is, it isn’t made for large-scale projects like sneaker copyright infringement. When I looked down to see what they were laughing at, I saw that I now had BALLBOKS instead of REEBOKS. Half of my Wite-Out had rubbed off, leaving the first half of the BALLOONS logo to merge with my handwritten BOK. Having Ballboks was even worse than having Balloons: to seventh-graders, any punch line that contained the word
ball
was deemed twenty times funnier than one without a phallic reference.

“Ballbok!” Fred sputtered out. He dropped over his desk, shaking it as the laughter overtook his entire body.

Mrs. Bratspir covered the receiver of the wall phone and turned to Fred, her eyes blazing black. “Are you insane?” she asked.

“Ballbok!” Fred screamed out and pointed at my shoes.

Mrs. Bratspir hung up the phone and walked slowly toward Fred’s pointing finger. It was the only time in three years of being her student that I ever heard her laugh. She looked at me with pity and amusement, shook her head, and began the lesson on DNA.

The Ballboks let everyone know that I knew I wasn’t cool and, more important, that I cared. Now I was not only uncool with the popular kids, I was also shunned by the nerds.

The bullying at school worsened. Tascha would threaten to cut my hair in the cafeteria, Christina would force girls to throw me against my locker while I was trying to open it. Several times I left school with red marks and dents on my face. I couldn’t eat, I had knots of fear in my stomach. Every day, I’d hear a new rumor about when I was going to get my ass kicked. When school let out, I’d either hide until Christina and Tascha left or run as fast as I could to the subway, hopping on it before the girls arrived.

I felt I had no one to turn to. I had abandoned Dara when both Pam and the cool kids had made fun of our friendship. I tried to go back to her, but it was awkward. She was into boys, so she tried to hook me up, but none of the white guys found me attractive. I played lookout for a short time, while she kissed her boyfriend during recess, but soon that made me feel even lonelier than when I sat by myself.

I rationalized that I couldn’t tell my teachers; what could they do, walk me to the subway every day? Plus, Christina and Tascha would kill me if they found out I’d told. I decided that Pam, being a Real Black Person, could teach me how to fight. Pam owed me at least a fighting lesson. Besides being her usual mean self, she’d begun lying to people and telling them I was her daughter. According to Pam, having a half-white daughter would up her status with black people.

While shopping, we ran into a friend she hadn’t seen since junior high.

“Are these your kids?” her friend asked.

“Yeah, these are my little brats,” she said, looking at my brother and me, daring us to contradict her.

“You got with a white man?” her friend asked. Pam smiled and nodded her head up and down. On the spot, she made up a well-detailed lie about her babies’ rich Italian father.

“Ooh, I can’t wait until she spreads that around! I’m gonna be just like Diana Ross. She ain’t the only bitch can have a white husband,” she explained to me, before we walked to the corner store to buy a night’s worth of marijuana.

When I asked Pam for boxing lessons, she seemed proud, like a mother bird watching her chick preparing to take a solo flight. She stood up and put her fists against her cheeks. “Protect your face,” she instructed me. “When I fight light-skinned girls, I always go for the face.”

The next day, Tascha pushed me against my locker, leaving a long scratch on my cheek. I was too afraid to push her back. When Pam saw the scratch, she pronounced me untrainable. “You don’t have the heart,” she said. “That’s your white side.”