Five Chapters, In Black

I.
She was a little black girl and she hated her hair. She didn’t always hate her hair. She didn’t even have hair until four. But then she had interesting hair. She had good hair. People pulled on it. She didn’t care. Not yet. She didn’t even know she was black. Not yet. She used an orange crayon to draw her mom, a black crayon to draw her dad, and a brown crayon to draw her sister and herself. Her grandma was gray. This made her mother laugh. “She’s white! Your white grandma, silly, like me.” The girl frowned. Her grandma and her mom were not the same color. Her mom looked like sunlight always hung on her skin. Her grandma looked like the clouds. Were adults always going to ignore these nuances? It didn’t matter either way. Her gray crayon had broken and her white crayon didn’t show up on drawing paper. This was terribly inconvenient. She decided whiteness was too annoying for drawing purposes. Until she updated from an 8-count to a 24-count box of crayons and discovered the peach crayon. Whiteness was solved for the moment and colors were simply wax and paper.

At Safety Town she learned more about colors. She learned green means go; red means stop; and yellow, well she frequently forgot that one, but she’d pick it up again in kindergarten. She made a friend. She picked the friend because she smiled often and her hair had bobbles at the end. The little black girl, like the white little girls, wanted the bobbles, but their moms didn’t know where to get the bobbles (ethnic hair aisle), so they all settled for barrettes (hair aisle). The barrettes just fell out of the girl’s hair. Her friend was browner than she was, like her dad. She liked that. The other girl’s mom looked like her Granny. Brown skin, gray hair. She liked that too. Her mom told her it was relieving she had friends like herself. She didn’t think it was particularly difficult to find friends like herself; all little girls in her experience were nearly the same. She and her browner friend made a little bus out of construction paper that said their names, sharpie-d by their instructor at the bottom, but they wouldn’t stay in touch.

In preschool she made new friends. Making new friends would become her most admirable trait. There were a set of twins and they looked like her, except one was darker than her and one was lighter than her. She liked to sit between them and hold their hands. She liked how she fit there. They all had big hair. The twins had one black parent and one white parent. She thought this was fairly standard. They had two moms and no dad. This wasn’t standard to her, but she was incredibly jealous of the set up. The twins would be her friends until preschool ended and they went to different elementary schools across town. A long distance relationship like that is hard to maintain at an age so young.

Her other friends weren’t brown. They were peach. How fun! She’d never had peach friends before, but of course she wasn’t going to pass judgment until she tried it out. She picked one girl and one boy.

The boy.

He was her first boy. Boys were fascinating. They had hot wheels. She loved hot wheels. They had toy bow and arrows and Nerf guns and all their rooms were blue. She added blue to her color arsenal. This boy was doubly interesting because he had one white parent and one white parent who wasn’t white. She knew the parent wasn’t white because she didn’t feed them chicken tenders or PB&J on playdates (these were the girl’s first inklings of whiteness). She instead fed them things like rice and, what’s the green stuff called, mom? Yes, seaweed. “It grows in the water,” the boy would say. She’d then peer into the creek in his backyard to see and he’d shove her in. She’d be shocked, then thrilled every time. Eventually, practical jokes where her hair gets wet will annoy her, but right now they are hilarious.

The girl.

The girl had a bigger house and a bigger smile than the little black girl. The girl always had a new little brother, so she had a bigger family too. They went to a church. They spent a lot of time trying to save the little black girl. Save her from what? She didn’t know. She didn’t care. She liked the family until she got older. Then they disapproved of her skirt length (mini) and her parents’ marital status (divorced) and her first political ideology (pro-choice). She and the girl would stop being friends when they stopped being little girls. It was easier.

She started elementary school! Elementary school was incredibly easy for her. She was gifted. She was an advanced speller. She was a reading-time leader. She had new friends. They were all boys. White boys. This will be funny later, in college, and people will laugh and say, “We should’ve known then!” but for right now this was just a fact. Boys were fascinating. At recess they didn’t play four square. They jumped off swings and ate worms. She learned to trade Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh cards like a “G.” She spat. She had her first kiss with one of the boys. Later, they wouldn’t get along because he turned into the boy who said nigga despite having the coloration of a Norse god and exactly one black friend. But for now, they held hands and giggled and stole kisses under the play structure. She was forced to make new friends when the Cub Scouts started because they wouldn’t let her join. “Why mom?” she asked. “I like pancakes.” Pancake making was the only activity she knew for sure the Cub Scouts did. “Because you’re a girl,” her mom said. What was the difference between boys and girls again? “Yeah, join the Brownies idiot. Be a normal girl, hang with other girls,” her sister said. She’d noticed her sister, currently an intimidating middle schooler, liked the word normal. The little black girl didn’t think it was particularly interesting or helpful, but she listened.

So her new friends were girls. They were silly, but she didn’t mind. The boys would get mean anyway. They would tease and taunt and call her chubby a lot. She believed them for a long time. When she was ten, a boy called her mulatto, and when her mom heard about it, she frowned. “Who called you that, sweetie?” But her mom had the same look as when her older sister sweared, and she didn’t want to talk about it anymore, so she just shrugged and wouldn’t say. She’d end up screwing that boy after their senior prom. But that was a long way off. Right now, she was finishing the fifth grade. She’d joined the orchestra and now had a passion for the violin. She was first chair. Her parents didn’t notice because they were distracted by her sister, who was beginning her decline, but right now, it was just being a teenager.

She had only a few friends but didn’t mind. One of her friends was Korean. They were stand partners. Her Korean friend took the little black girl to a vacation bible school where everyone else was also Korean. She loved this. They had water balloon fights, her third favorite summer activity behind swimming and sprinkler dashing. “Are you sure you want to go?” her mother had asked her. “You won’t feel left out?” Why would she feel left out? “No mom, it’s fun.” Her mom smiled. “You fit in everywhere don’t you?” Was she not supposed to fit in some places? She still didn’t know she was black, although she knew Obama was, and that this was historical!

She didn’t care about her hair.

II.
She hated her hair now. Sixth grade had taught her. It taught her pretty meant straight blond hair, curvy (but not too curvy) body, and blue eyes. It also taught her pretty was pretty important. She could play four instruments and had the highest marks by eighth grade but that wasn’t very helpful. She made a friend who challenged this lesson. “I don’t care what I look like,” the girl would say. “I think the pretty girls are dumb, don’t you?” The little black girl would nod but only notice how blue the other girl’s eyes were. The seventh grade and her sister taught her elitism. Her sister played field hockey now and only wore the good brands. Her sister had all white friends. “The blacks in that school aren’t our type of black,” she would say. The little black girl, only newly familiar with the fact they were black, was confused. There were types of black? Were there types of white? Is that what Koreans were? She listened to her sister but wondered if her mom had noticed she wasn’t eating yet. If she distanced herself from the black lunch table, which was the loudest (also the most visibly fun but that was always ignored), then she too could turn her nose up at them. Black laughter was too massive to be genuine anyway. However, she still stole smiles and friendly greetings in passing by from the members of the black table. Her guilty pleasure became enjoying black company. She sat between the black girls and the white girls on the bench at her team’s basketball games. She could lean either way. She liked it there.

The eighth grade taught her her features were her own fault. The hatred of her hair had spiraled into full disdain. She had to take action. Any respectable girl would. She asked for a flat iron for her birthday, a blow dryer for Christmas, and begged her mom to let her get her hair relaxed. Her mom disapproved of this, but had no alternative, so the girl received her gifts. She wore her hair straight. It resembled a horse’s ass. It was dry and brittle and always smelled burnt, but her classmates chorused “I love it” and “it’s better straight!” What a victory. As a result of her new attractiveness, a boy danced with her at the eighth grade dance. “He likes you!” her friends said. Except one. That girl didn’t care about boys and never would.

When she swam or showered, her hair would curl again. It would get matted and spiral against her neck. Her husband will one day love seeing her hair fresh out of the shower and call the damp tendrils “curly noodles.” But she had no husband now, so in a moment of rage, she cut off her hair to just above her chin. This would be the easiest length to press with the flat iron every day. Later, she’ll regret this when she wants the hair to grow, when she doesn’t fear the curl. But for now, this was how she’d look. Short, straight, and no nonsense. No black nonsense, anyway.

III.
She was pretty now? Despite her blackness she received compliments about her appearance. Maybe it was because her braces were gone and she wore contacts and she managed to squeeze her black ass into Hollister jeans. (The jeans were constantly being replaced due to rips in the thighs.) More people liked her, more pale people anyways, and at the time these were the ones that mattered. She took classes almost entirely with Asians and at her school this was a sign of status. “You’re so smart, you’re basically Asian,” her friends remarked. She smiled as her fingers twitched. This would be a lifelong response to white compliments. She said she did well in school because her dad considered B’s a failing grade. “Is you dad like Asian, haha,” the friends said. Her father wasn’t Asian, only a typical black man. That’s what her mother had said when he left them.

She realized she hadn’t been smiling at the black table for a while when she left the A.P. bubble for P.E. She found cold black shoulders, and rolled black eyes, and murmurs of oreo. She had good hair and white friends and she smoked out of glass and didn’t like purple drank and she couldn’t braid, so who was she even? She would be relieved when her senior year schedule was all A.P. classes and orchestra. As she suspected she was the only black person in every single class. She liked it where she decided what black was. Innocent crushes were important. However, that would only last until the majority of her class turned sixteen. Then less innocent interactions were important. “Who do you like, who do you like,” the friends chanted. Her first crush had the last name Gudal. “She has a thing for Indian guys,” the friends said. She didn’t. But he brought her sweets at lunch. They joked about the huge, week-long, Deep South plus South Indian-style cookout / wedding / diva-off-between-grandmothers that would be their hypothetical union. It was hypothetical because she wasn’t pretty enough to date outside her race.

She liked her stand partner in orchestra, whose last name was Geng. “She has a thing for Asian guys,” the friends said. She didn’t. But he thought she was funny and also thought she ate an oddly charming amount of kimchi. “Do black people like kimchi?” he asked. She did an impression of her grandmother eating Korean food for the first time in response. They laughed. She liked laughing with him, but because she had recently failed a math class, she assumed that was a deal breaker. Maybe she wasn’t smart enough to date an Asian guy.

The friends liked her last set of crushes more. Those ones were white. “Oh, you’ve always had a thing for white guys!” Had she? Funny, she hadn’t noticed. She chose to believe it for convenience. The homecoming king was black. She knew him. Sort of. Their dads had been friends. “He’s cute for a black boy,” one of the friends said. She nodded. She supposed it was like the way she was cute for a black girl. “Hm,” another one said. “I just don’t think black boys are cute.” The black girl found this bothered her. It was wrong, right? She wasn’t sure. Someday, she would be much more sure, but right now she was sitting on the beach with her friends, under an umbrella while they tanned.

IV.
She was Black. This was because she was born Black. But also because she was quite adamant about being Black. What had happened? The little black girl had become a Black girl. It was because of a white boy. A white boy who was so white, so blindingly white with his watches and his J. Crew and his boat(s). Who so consistently called her exotic and pulled on her hair and commented on her not needing sunscreen (white people would never understand that skin cancer doesn’t share the same biases as them) that she finally had to correct him. It was the only way to stop loathing herself for letting a man touch her whose friends referred to her as “black girlfriend” and never by name. She began correcting him so much that eventually even she had to learn more about blackness. Had to pay attention to her father and his family and why they all called each other cousin. The valve was turned on, the valve that had been a trickle in childhood (Space Jam, Drumline, black Disney, worship of the Williams sisters, church with Granny, bebop on the house speakers, new little baby pairs of Jordans every year . . .) and suddenly her whole life was Black.

She read Black media. She watched Black television. She quoted W. E. B. Du Bois and prayed to both God and Beyoncé. Her favorite presidents were Obama (the first Black president) and Bill Clinton (who, despite the 1994 bill that must not be named, was also the first Black president). She had an altar to Malcolm, and believed that those who denied his contribution to civil rights had drunk the vanilla Kool-Aid. Soul food was the best food. Her favorite pie was sweet potato. Unless Granny made pecan; then it was pecan. She embraced the stereotypes connected with her culture, and rejected the ones made from her melanin. Fuck Miley Cyrus. Fuck Katy Perry. Fuck Kylie Jenner. She wore her hair out in its coils, she wore it boxed in braids, or she cornrowed it down and wore her paycheck in weave. Whichever she did, she did not apologize. She rolled her eyes at the following things:

She believed if she rolled her eyes hard enough no one would notice that she was still steeped in whiteness. With the exception of her mother, she was beginning to resent it. Her friends were all white, all her boyfriends were white. How could she be Black when she only saw white?

In college she met others like her. She wished she’d met them earlier. They were blacks, but they had white mommas or liked Rachel Ray or had too much money. Some of them also drifted from the white community to each other. Some also stood at the edge of the blacks, looking at a mirror but not an entrance. They spent a lot of time together. They moved from “Carol, you’re being ridiculous! The mums look fine with the orange daisies,” to “nigga what” and “thank you for your service,” to “fuck da police,” with the ease with which one rolls from one side of the bed to the other. Their favorite song was the Run-D.M.C/Aerosmith collab “Walk this Way,” but none of them would admit it. She wore her headscarves with her lulus and her cornrows with her Warby Parkers.

V.
She was black. A black woman. She liked being black although it was hard sometimes. Work had been hard. Finding it, getting it, keeping it. “You sounded white on paper,” some said. “You’re here just because you’re the token,” said others. She traveled down South for a business trip. A man called her a negress at the gas station. A negress. She would’ve rolled her eyes instead of clutching her keys if she’d been above the Mason-Dixon and less alone. She had some trouble with the neighbors at her first home. They held their kids’ hands slightly harder when she walked by and they were quick to tell her that her lawn needed to be mowed or her mailbox needed painting. She liked the house though, and painted a Black Panther Party fist on her mailbox. For her neighbors’ sake.

She married a white man and she didn’t feel guilty about it. He was the nicest person she knew, and when she met him he was comically ignorant, even had a Southern Indiana lilt to his voice, but he wanted to learn. And he did. They had a son who, with mousey brown and wispy hair, passed, and she loved him, of course she did. But when their daughter was born with brown skin, brown eyes, brown everything, and a head of tight curls, she cried happy hot tears at creating something so dark, so beautiful. She also worried. She stayed in the car on road trips down South. But it was always worth it to see her barely white barely black son gaze at his black relatives with such love. “Tell me about fishing,” he said. “Tell me about your first Cadillac.” “Tell me about the March.” A boy called her daughter a quadroon at school. Her daughter kicked him. Hard. In the balls like her momma taught her to. She had to defend her daughter to a red-faced, mildly flustered principal.

She taught her daughter the things she’d learned that she wished she’d learned earlier. She told her not to listen when her aunt was being bitter. Her daughter liked oranges and crackers and Big Momma’s pecan pie. She loved Grandma’s cookies and drew her with an orange crayon. She liked her Granddaddy’s booming laugh and drew him with a black crayon. She liked pink and gymnastics. She loved her mom, of course, and her big brother, despite the fact that he sometimes ate all the peanut butter with a spoon. She liked her dad because he talked funny and played catch with her and the big inflatable ball.

She also liked her hair.