Paper Planes
I am six years old. It is Father’s Day, and my mother and I are visiting my father at the minimum-security federal prison camp in Boron, California. I don’t know why he’s here, only that he has been taken away from us and that we moved out to this sparse desert area to be closer to him. Boron FPC had been an Air Force base until a few years ago, and the large plaster-white radar dome on top of a tower in the middle of the facility makes it easy for me to pretend that we are visiting Epcot at Disney World. We meet my father in the cafeteria, which is slowly filling with women like my mother and children like me. The kindergartners and first graders among us exult at the sight of our fathers and burst forward to hug their huge crouching bodies. The middle school kids and teenagers hang back and get pushed by their mothers to acknowledge their fathers.
The vending machines sell microwavable soup cups and browning bananas and tasteless, pre-packaged sandwich triangles, so this is what we all eat for lunch. Robin Leach wishes us champagne wishes and caviar dreams from a television mounted behind a thick sheet of clear acrylic in a box high on the wall while our mothers sip from cans of RC Cola and Tab and ask our fathers how they are holding up before launching into detailed updates of our families’ financial problems and court cases. Our fathers respond by telling our mothers to call in a favor with so-and-so, to make sure to tell the lawyer such and such, and to remember to put money on his books—yeah, things are tight, but he gotta eat too, damn.
My father surprises me with a present that he made in the woodworking shop—a large, blue, wooden toy chest painted with Looney Tunes characters, and my mother asks him how she’s supposed to get it into our apartment by herself. You’re not by yourself, Diana, says my father. You got Ronny to help you. Ain’t that right, Ronny? You’re the man of the house while I’m away, aren’t you Ronny?
Yes I am! I say.
As our parents’ conversations grow more whispered and more of their words become s p e l l e d o u t to protect the youngest of us from overhearing, we begin slipping away from our lunch tables. Some of us whip around the room playing tag. A group of teenagers sit adjacent to each other by the window without interacting much. Toddlers squirm and kick and fuss in their mother’s laps, demanding to be set down. Several of the kids my age are at a table with cups of crayons and a few coloring books, making last-minute somethings to present to their fathers before they leave.
An inmate sees me trying to decide what I want to do and motions me over to his table. He is a white man with a gray, bristly beard. When he coughs, black tar comes up, and he spits it into a wad of paper towels gripped in his hand. He offers to teach me how to origami paper into an airplane that loops when you throw it, and I have a lot of fun learning this from him. The trick is to make a plane with a flat, heavy nose and upturned flaps in the back, and to throw it with just the right amount of force. While we crease plain white sheets into crisp aerodynamic shapes together, the man leans in and says, Hey, do you know what your daddy is? He’s a ——! He’s real friendly and encourages me to go tell my father what he said, so I get excited. I fold another airplane into being, a perfect one that loops three, four, five times and glides onto its belly when it lands, and run back toward my parents, flying it in my hand stretched out high above my head.
Daddy! I say, and I throw the plane to him, releasing it like a dart. It performs two large curlicues in the air before reaching him, and he catches it in the crook of his arm like a football, laughing. Say! he says. That’s pretty good, Ronny! Did you make this? I plop my little body next to his on the plastic yellow bench of the cafeteria table and say, Yeah!
Then I say: Daddy, guess what, I know what you are!
Oh, yeah? What’s that, Ronny?
You’re a ——! I say. The man told me.
My mother’s eyes treble in size, and she shouts: No! Never say that word again! Do you know what that means? I do not know what the word means. My father says nothing. He puts the knuckles of both hands onto the table and pushes himself up. He stands like that for a long while, leaning onto both fists, staring with all the tiny muscles in his jaw flexed at the smirking man who taught the word to me. My mother is standing now, too, looking worried, rubbing small soft circles into my father’s back and speaking something soothing into his ear. The guard standing by the door to the cafeteria takes a few steps toward us and shouts demands that my father sit down. He eventually does so, slowly lowering himself onto the table bench with my airplane crumpled in his left hand.
This is my introduction to the word and the last time I will ever speak it against another black person.
Time to Eat
My mother and younger sisters and I are at Mom Mom’s apartment in Redondo Beach. When I was a toddler, my speech impediment turned the words grandma and grandmother into a mishmash of unintelligible syllables that fumbled off my lips, so I tried to call her ‘Mom’s mom’ and in the process coined an affectionate nickname, one that she has forbidden me from abandoning regardless of the embarrassment it causes me.
Mom Mom’s apartment is filled with the familiar Thanksgiving smells of turkey cooking in the oven, huge platters of mac and cheese, potatoes au gratin, and green bean casserole cooling on the kitchen counter. But there are also her peculiar additions to the holiday—beef goulash, nudli dumplings, and sour cherry soup made from recipes my great-grandmother brought with her from Hungary. My mother has learned these recipes, too, but something’s always missing when she makes them, some secret something that only Mom Mom seems to possess.
Mom Mom’s a crafter. We never leave her apartment without new handmade MC Hammer pants and button-up shirts, or dolls and cheaply framed needlepoint mallards made from the stacks of patterns in her sewing room. She is very productive, and every time we visit her apartment it’s more cluttered with her work. Today, a new set of knitted dolls catches my eye in her living room. They are resting on the huge, sweet-smelling cedar chest in which she keeps her collection of VHS tapes recorded from HBO and Showtime broadcasts. There are three dolls, all dressed in formal, old-timey clothes that remind me of the way the actors dressed in Mary Poppins. One is a white man with brown-button eyes, brown hair, and a smile denoted by a thin upturned curve of thread. The next is a blue-eyed white woman with long yellow hair made of yarn, wearing a wide-hemmed dress over a frilly, lace petticoat. These two dolls have identical, thin noses. The last doll is of a dark, brown-skinned man with black eyes, a wide nose shaped like an upside-down poblano pepper, and large red lips made from felt stretched over a gap-toothed grin.
I start playing with the dolls and realize that their clothes are held together in the back with small white strips of Velcro, and thus removable. While my mother’s helping Mom Mom in the kitchen and my sisters are watching a Care Bears movie on the living room TV, I’m busy exploring these dolls. I rip the hooks and loops of their clothing fasteners apart and learn that the dolls are anatomically complete underneath their clothes. The woman has small cotton-filled breasts on her chest and a triangle of pubic hair crafted from loops of black yarn between her legs. The white man features a normal-looking penis, unremarkable save for the fact that it exists. But the black doll, I discover, possesses a member whose size makes no sense to me. As I puzzle over this purposeful and baffling difference between the male dolls, Mom Mom and my mother begin bringing huge platters of food out from the kitchen.
Ronny, come help set the table, says Mom Mom. It’s time to eat.
Tupperware
Jilynn is darker than Vanessa and me, the deep golden-brown of her skin the color of the crust on our whole-wheat, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Vanessa is the color of the wheat that crust surrounds, not even any darker than I am, really. But both are recognizably black in a way that I am not, and it changes the way people treat them. The first time I take them to the corner store, I notice that the white man who owns the store calls his wife out from the back room and points them out to her with his eyes. She hovers around them in the candy aisle and watches them, straightening candy boxes that don’t need straightening, while I stand a few feet away, trying to decide which comic book I want to buy.
When I rejoin my sisters and ask them if they have decided what they want, the woman says, Oh, they’re with you? I tell her Yes, that these are my sisters, and she nods and returns to the back room. She has never hovered over my shoulder the way she did my sisters, and I know they weren’t doing anything to bring on this extra scrutiny. They always behave in public. So I’m beginning to understand that the skin I wear has been bleached of something that my sisters still have, made somehow more palatable. I don’t get watched in the candy aisle—I just buy what I want. There’s an inexplicable advantage in being white, and my skin is received as though it’s shrink-wrapped tight around the body of a white person, even though it’s infused with the vestigial flavors of my ancestors, like dollar store Tupperware that has been left in the microwave for too long.
Translucence
It is a few days before Christmas. My name is still Ronny Valentine, I still live with my mother, and she’s taking my sisters and me to meet a stranger for the first time. The man’s name, I’m told, is also Ronnie—spelled with an I-E appended at the end, the grown man spelling—but most everyone calls him Red or Red-Top, on account of his hair. He lives a long drive away, in Los Angeles. After we descend from the freeway into his neighborhood, my mother pulls our borrowed Cadillac over to the curb and twists her body around to face me and my sisters in the backseat. She explains that this old friend of hers whom we are visiting shared a special bond with me when I was a baby, that he is my godfather, that I was named after him.
So if he says anything weird to you, that’s what he’s talking about, she says.
’K, I say.
Ronnie isn’t there when we arrive at his mother’s house. She is a frail, old brown woman named Mary, which I think is interesting, because the wet, big-eyed way she looks at me somehow reminds me of the way Mom Mom does sometimes, and her first name is Mary, too. This Mary’s hands have a consistent tremor to them that make me wonder how her hair got pressed so perfectly. Maybe it’s a wig. She maintains the cleanest, quietest little house I’ve ever seen. Her couch is encased in a clear, thick, plastic cover, and every bare part of my body sticks to it when I sit down. She asks me how I’m doing in school, what I like to do, who my friends are. She has a strange sick smell on her breath that I notice when she gets a little too close to me, which is often.
Ronnie’s brother Harry arrives soon after we do. He’s somewhat lighter-skinned than Mary, with conked-out hair and a smile that shows a lot of gum. He is gregarious and flashy and wrapped in a too-tight polyester leisure suit and wide-lapel shirt. When he enters the house he holds Mary’s hands in his in the doorway and kisses her on the forehead, sharing a sweet moment that is a mystery to me.
Hi, Harry, says my mother over Mary’s shoulder. How’s Barbara?
Oh, she’s good, says Harry without looking at her. She wanted to come, too, but we didn’t have anyone to cover for her in the office today.
Harry comes all the way into the house and claps his hands together when he finds me watching the adults from the couch.
There he is! he says. Wow, Ronny! I haven’t seen you since you were a baby, knee-high to a grasshopper, man, look at you—you’re damn near grown.
Hi, Mr. Huett, I say.
Call me Harry, he insists.
I notice that no one’s paying my sisters the same level of attention that I’m receiving.
Then Ronnie arrives, and the mood in the house shifts in a tiny, confusing, almost imperceptible way. Like Harry, he greets his mother on the doorstep, but more anxiously. He’s eager to get inside. I wonder what he’s running from. He has the most familiar face I have ever seen. He kneels down and shakes my hand, and when I look into his eyes I get uncomfortable and recoil. He peers into me with an intense, too-familiar friendliness. I can tell that the way he sees through me makes my mother nervous, so I decide he’s making me nervous, too. Like my father Youless, he is a black man, but a high-yellow one who wears his hair in a short puff of reddish-brown Afro. His biscuit-colored hands have precious manicured fingernails but are also calloused, possessing a patina of black grease that has taken root in the whorls of his knuckles. He works with his hands, a mechanic, something to do with buses. He possesses an arsenal of gestures and behaviors that I know I’ve seen somewhere before.
Before we leave, Ronnie waits for my mother to be occupied with putting my sisters’ coats on, takes me into the dining room, and says, Hey, kid, hold on a second. I have something for you. Then he gives me a perfect, uncreased hundred-dollar bill. I try to decline it, but he insists that I take it and makes me promise to spend it on myself. When Harry sees this he comes over and slips me another twenty dollars. I have never seen this much money in my life, let alone possessed it. Then Mary asks me if I like chocolate and strawberry milkshakes, and when I say that I do, gives me a case of Ensure meal replacement drinks, which taste much more like chalky thick medicine liquid than milkshakes.
On the long drive home it occurs to me that my sisters didn’t get anything from the generous family we visited. I have my mother stop at a Thrifty’s drug store, where I buy a Scrabble board game as my Christmas gift to her and a couple of cheap stuffed animals for Jilynn and Vanessa. I keep Harry’s twenty for myself and surprise my mother with the rest of the money, because I know she’s worried about our finances. I’m delighted to be able to do this but also confused by the fact that Ronnie and Harry gave me so much money. I don’t know a lot about money, but what I am sure of is that nobody just gives it to you unsolicited, in large amounts, for no reason. It makes no sense to me that they would do this.
There is a thought percolating within my brain folds, or perhaps it is a memory insisting itself on my consciousness.
Clipboard
I am sitting in the front office of my new elementary school. This is the second time I’ve transferred schools—that my family has abruptly had to carry trash-bag luggage to a new apartment—so far this year. My mother hands the lady behind the counter a clipboarded enrollment form. The lady flits confused glances from the form to me, to my mother, back to the form. She’s puzzling over a discrepancy. Oh, ma’am, you’ve made a mistake, she says. You checked off your son’s race as ‘other’ and wrote, ‘child is biracial black-slash-white.’
Yes, says my mother, and I start shaking my head behind her—not because she’s wrong, but because I’m clearing my head of a premonition.
But your son is white—
Bitch, don’t you think I know what race my son is! shouts my mother, fist hammering down, pen on a chain jumping off countertop, office lady realizing she done fucked up...
Wobbly Spirals
It is another too-hot afternoon in summer, 1985.
My mother and I have been sitting together on the front porch of our house for hours, while she struggles to say something to me; I don’t know what. I’m not really paying attention.
I have a golden cocker spaniel with big flappy ears. Her name is Tuffy, because when she came to live with us I didn’t know she was a girl, and I de-sired for her to be tough, like I imagine I am. She’s running around our threadbare yard, snapping her little jaws at the air, plotting an escape. The last time she got out I had to chase her barefoot down the street. The baking black asphalt blistered my soles, and now I’m sitting here on this decaying wooden bench, with clear liquid weeping from the bottom of my feet into my socks.
I do know, though, what she isn’t saying.
My sisters are somewhere behind us in the house, arguing and wrestling over who gets to play with what doll. They’ve been bickering all summer, their little voices producing a constant, irritating background din. Just take turns! I shout into the dusty window screen.
What’s so complicated?
Ritchie has ridden by on his bike several times. The first time, he paused at our gate and asked if I could come play T&C Surf Designs on his Nintendo, was told: later. Now when he passes by, he slows down, reads our faces, keeps coasting. I caught a fat, iridescent June bug this morning and tied it by a leg to the porch banister with a piece of string, and now I’m watching it fly in a buzzing, never-ending, increasingly unstable loop. It chooses not to land, to remain a shimmery purple-green streak, condemned to zip exhausted, wobbly spirals in the air. My mother, likewise, continues to talk in circles that never quite settle on what she’s trying to get at.
Finally, I just say it for her: That guy Ronnie is my dad, isn’t he?
She nods her head, says, yes, and now what I know and what I have believed for the past several months are the same thing.
Ritchie’s turning the corner back onto our block. My Mongoose bike is laying on its side on our driveway. I pick it up, call out to him, start pedaling.
Ice Cream
My name is Ronny Huett now. My father took me with him to the Social Security office several months back, where we sat on hard, plastic chairs connected in a row for hours with my birth certificate, until he was allowed to approach a window and have the indifferent woman on the other side of the Plexiglas barrier disentangle whatever it was that my mother and Youless did to falsify my name. I live with Ronnie in an apartment in Mom Mom’s building in Redondo Beach. I call him Dad or Pop, and he mostly calls me ‘hey kid.’ His friends, the ones that made it back from the Vietnam War with him, call me ‘Lil Red’ after him.
The day Pop asked me if I wanted to stay and live with him, I had to call my mother and tell her I wasn’t going to be coming back home, and it was hard. She accused me of abandoning her and my sisters and was not wrong. They still live in Ontario, and Youless lives somewhere else with the new family he has started with a woman named Anne.
Redondo Beach is a mostly white city, or at least we live in the whitest area of this mostly white city, and I haven’t figured out how I’m supposed to behave here yet. I haven’t made any friends at my new school, and my grades have continued the slide they started the year before. I’m embarrassed by this but can’t seem to make myself do the things a person would do to get better grades. Pop’s gone for work a lot, and Mom Mom’s supposed to watch me when he isn’t around, but this arrangement has, in practice, been a failure. I’ve started to ditch school and go to the huge library on Pacific Coast Highway instead, where I can read what-ever I want. Sometimes I sit at the microfiche machines and spend hours reading newspapers from the previous year, or the year I was born, or random dates from decades ago. I know that if I were to go to the arcade at the Del Amo Mall in Torrance, my truant ass would get caught, but somehow none of the adults I interact with here notice or care that I’m at the library during school hours. I am invisible here.
I go to the beach nearly every day and alternate between getting sunburned and tan. As my skin peels off and sheds, my body turns three colors at once: brown, red, and white, like Neapolitan ice cream. The too-bright, soft, new baby skin that replaces the brown that sloughs off is always the wrong color.
But sometimes black people I don’t know approach me on the street and ask: Excuse me, but are you part black? And when I say, Actually, yeah, my dad is black, they nod and say, Yeah, I thought so. I got a cousin, he look just like you. And we connect with each other briefly in a way that reminds me that I have family out there, that I am part of a proud diaspora, that I am not actually all alone in the world.
Random white strangers have started approaching me, too. Only they demand to know, What are you? and refuse to accept any answer that evades their need to categorize me. They feel entitled to a complete, satisfactory answer. I knit my brow in mock confusion and look at my arms and say, I think I’m a person. Or I say, I’m an American, or I’m a boy, or, I read recently that we’re all made up of about 60% water. I give any answer I can think of that isn’t the one I know they want.
No, but what are you, really? they say.
My name’s Ronny Huett, I answer, as though that’s what they asked me. Nice to meet you.
Hypertension
I am nineteen years old, applying for a job as a mail clerk in the hypertension and nephrology division of Harbor-UCLA Medical Center. During the course of my interview with the head of the department, I mention that I’ve been diagnosed with high blood pressure. He wants to know what I’m doing to treat this condition, and I answer: nothing. Suddenly his complexion changes, and he confronts me. Excuse me, but you’re black right? he spits. I begin to stammer, because this seems irrelevant to whether or not he should hire me as a mail clerk. He grows more agitated: You are, in fact, a black man, are you not? he demands. I say, Yes—yes, I am. I’m black. I wonder how he knows to ask me this; white people so rarely perceive it. He calms down and explains that African Americans with high blood pressure are predisposed to develop kidney disease. He hires me and makes me spend my first day at work in the dialysis unit, watching what he insists will happen to me if I don’t take medicine to bring my blood pressure under control.
Storytime
I work at the Borders Books and Music at the World Trade Center in New York City. Two of my coworkers and I have been given the privilege of performing storytime in the kids’ section on Tuesday mornings. The children gather around us in an amorphous and chaotic semi-circle next to the big brown trunk of the fiberglass tree on the second floor of the store. Dina reads the stories and helps Lisa sing the songs, and I accompany them on my guitar. The children perform adorable, clunky, arrhythmic dance moves when I play. Their Haitian and Dominican nannies gossip and laugh a little too loudly, while Lisa and I attempt to corral the children back onto the bright, primary-colored rug, and Dina reads Goodnight Moon or Love You Forever or my favorite: No, David!
Dina’s Greek, with a huge tangle of black hair and a mouth that is always twisted into a smirk. She possesses a husky, satisfying laugh that reverberates against the walls of every room in which it’s summoned, so I’m always scheming to make her laugh. I mostly succeed. Lisa has sandy, yellowish-brown skin, hair that coils into tight blonde kinks, and green eyes. She has a tattoo on her shoulder of the same goofy, cat-face sticker that I happen to have on my guitar.
She is, like me, half-black and half-white. My first week working in the store, she had hung around the stockroom for a while, watching me break down pallets of books before approaching me when we were alone, talking about, Hey, Ron, you know we got something in common right?
I leaned onto my forearms against the large cube of boxes I was unpacking, lifted my chin toward her in recognition, and said, Yeah . . . damn half-breeds! and she laughed.
***
Today I am tuning my guitar and practicing “Mulberry Bush” (which I’ve transformed into an indie-rock toddler-dance hit) in the break room. Two of my coworkers, both black, are taking their break at the same time as me.
Willie asks, Do you know any Bob?
Dylan? I say, and they both roll their eyes at each other.
I knew you were gonna say that shit! says Jamila, and I realize that I have failed a test.
Naw, man, naw, says Willie. I meant Marley. And the annoying thing is—I know lots of Marley songs. I perform “Three Little Birds” for five-year-olds every Tuesday.
But no Dylan.
Stars and Bars
I have been waiting over an hour for a Saturday bus. I’m keeping a wary eye on an agitated white man who keeps pacing around the bus stop, and in and out of traffic, talking angrily to himself about something. When he passes especially close by, I see that he has the stars and bars of the Battle Flag of the Army of Northern Virginia tattooed on the meat of his hand above his thumb. So I watch him a little more closely, but surreptitiously, out of the corner of my eye, while acting like I’m looking forward. When the bus finally comes, I get one foot onto its stairwell when the man comes up to me from behind.
He whispers it into my ear: I know what really you are, ——. As though I had been hiding it. As if I’m disguising myself under a mask that is my own face.
It’s shocking—not just that a man can could be so bold and so intent on being hurtful to me that he would invade my space and put those words into my head, but also because he has revealed himself to be a racial savant, capable of seeing in me what is imperceptible to most. And now I have to decide if I want to most likely lose a fight with this man right here in the street, and then walk a few miles home, or step all the way into the bus.
I choose to get on the bus and lose a fight right there on that street anyway.
Saltwater
I am twenty-seven years old, hanging out in a car by the beach, breathing in fresh saltwater air with a young woman I’m interested in and her friend. They’ve made a bet. The friend turns to me and asks, Hey, you’re part black, right? and I tell her that I am. She gloats and taunts her friend with I-told-you-sos. The young woman I’m interested in thought I was white. It turns out that she is half-black too, was born in Liberia, actually. Her father’s white, and her mother’s Ghanaian.
I thought she was Hispanic, which shows how much I know.
Not in Carson
I am walking across the street, holding hands with my girlfriend, Jackee. We live together with a few of my friends in a rented house. I’m still very interested in her. A car full of young Hispanic men pulls up and starts yelling at us, because they think that I am white, that she’s Mexican, and that we are in an interracial relationship. Not in Carson! one yells. You can’t do that shit here! But she’s the only woman I have ever been with who’s the same exact race as me. I’ve dated women of various races, but Jackee is the only one who is like me, both black and white at once, while also a little bit more of one than the other.
Water and Power
Fifteen feet. I am climbing a pole. With each step I stab a spike into its soft creosote-soaked wood and run a caress up its back with my gloved hands. Twenty feet. My body adopts an efficient sloth-like rhythm. My leather pole strap dangles in a long loop from my belt, swinging. Thirty feet. I let go of the pole with my right hand and reach down to my hip. I unclasp one of my strap’s snap hooks and throw it over the crossarm and around the pole. Then I clasp it to my left hip and lean back, no hands, connected to the pole only by my heel gaffs and this belt.
I’m an apprentice lineman for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. Today I’ve been given the opportunity to deconstruct this pole from the top down. I hook one foot around the pole and lean at a severe angle, Supermanning my body out so that I can reach the far end of the crossarm.
Come on, Caveman! Mike is shouting up at me. He’s a 5th step apprentice, a white man a few years younger than me who comes from a family of linemen. It’s his job to begin the process of infusing me with the skills and swagger required of a bona fide electrical distribution mechanic, or else to haze me out of the industry. His approach relies heavily on demands that I buy him breakfast, which I flatly refuse to do, threats of poor evaluations, and insults regarding my abilities and appearance. I have a prominent brow and a beard, so he didn’t have much trouble nicknaming me.
Now he’s watching me struggle up here. Who-ever put the nut on this insulator bolt must have been pissed off at his wife or something. Why take it out on the next guy, though? Jesus fucking Christ, why ratchet it down so tight? What’s the point? I thumb the worm screw between the jaws of my wrench forward until they have clamped down as tightly as possible against the stubborn nut, and I push its handle away from me as hard as I can with both hands. I strain and exert, pushing with all of my body into the wrench handle, with my lips pursed tight, feeling Mike pacing below me, getting nowhere.
What’s the problem up there? he calls.
Fucking nut won’t move, I say. What’s it look like?
***
Later, we are eating lunch together in the cab of our truck. Mike is irritated with me because it’s taking me too long to strip the pole, and at this pace we are going to be working in this backyard all day. I’m pissed at myself, too, be-cause he’s right. I drip sweat and eat my turkey sandwich with my gaze fixed into the future, plotting how I’m going to work when we get back. I’m fixing to disassemble the shit out of this pole when we get back—
Alright, Caveman, we’re gonna switch off after lunch, says Mike. I’m gonna do the rest of the pole, and you’ll take over on the ground.
I’m disappointed, and I hate this paternal, hair-tousling mode I see Mike sliding into.
You’ll get it next time, Caveman, he says. I just gotta get the fuck out of this neighborhood, eesh.
My body tightens, because I know he’s about to say it. I can smell the word on his breath. He has probably been chewing on it all day, turning it over on his tongue, savoring its mouthfeel. He recognizes some Neanderthal quality to my appearance that makes me not quite like him, but he doesn’t see my blackness. He is too comfortable around white people, something I can never be. I put my sandwich down and wait.
I hate working downtown, he says. Hanging out all day in these damn —— alleys and—
Don’t say that shit around me, I say, and he screws his face up like I’m offending him.
What’s up, Caveman? he says. You got some-thing you want to say to me?
Yeah, shut the fuck up with your —— alleys, I say. Keep that shit to yourself, Mike.
Gas and Electric
I am thirty-five-years old, listening to voice mails at work. One is from the United States Department of Labor. They’ve called me several times already, but I had assumed their messages were some kind of identity-theft scam and ignored them. This message is more urgent. I learn the reason that I never got a response to the job application I submitted a few years back to be an apprentice lineman for that company in Maryland: they discriminated against me because I had outed myself as black on the application. It didn’t matter that I had spent two years going to trade school earning certificates and commendations after work to become overqualified for the position. They just tossed my application in the trash with those of fifty other black applicants. The fact that my blackness is translucent was irrelevant. The terms of their settlement with the Department of Labor means that they now owe me thirteen thousand dollars, but I seriously consider not accepting the settlement check. I need this money. But I’m also afraid that I will have to collect it in person for some reason, and I don’t think I can handle another inevitable racial interrogation.
Cardboard
My sons Henry and Ben are four and three years old. Both of them are the same color beige as me. Cardboard babies, my wife and I call them. But their skins, like mine, are closer to the color of the roll of Kraft art paper that cascades down over the top of the Ikea drawing easel in their bedroom. It used to be that personal computers and other office machines only came in either this same tawny shade of beige or else a drab light-gray. When I was a young man I was the color of every stifling workplace I wanted to escape. And like mine, the skins of my children are tissue-paper thin, such that you can see our blue veins tracing proof of life across the soft insides of our forearms.
But today Henry tells me that he and Benny are yellow; that Ma is brown; and that I am orange. Orange is darker than yellow, is it not? But thanks to their maternal grandmother, these children are closer to Africa than I am. And I can’t see the orange in me that Henry perceives. Maybe he senses that I’m a Lil Red, too: after all, yellow mixed with a little red is orange. Alternately, he could be smelling that red-hot angry me that I hide from him, safely wrapped tight inside the folds of the comforting blanket of my light-colored skin. Maybe some of that leeches out onto him sometimes, even though I don’t want it to.
Dusty Cowboy
I am thirty-eight-years old, visiting my old friend Jeff at his new home in New Mexico. We are making music with a new buddy of his. His new friend is an actual cowboy, perennially covered in a soft layer of dust and horse stink. I’m noodling little guitar licks over the song he’s playing, only halfway listening to the lyrics. I’m thinking: Okay, his wife left him, he’s been drinking, lost his dog, some shit like that. This is a country song. Then I stop playing and slowly put my guitar down, because I’ve realized that he’s singing about how there’s nothing more useless than a white girl with a ——. He sees my discomfort and explains to me that this is a song by David Allen Coe, that it’s a very funny song actually. I don’t see the humor in it, and I’m damn sure not going to play along to it. So he shrugs and plays it without me while I just sit there in a daze, knowing that this smiling white cowboy with his huge tombstone teeth hates my mother and my father and my wife and my children and me. He has no idea what I am.
And what I am is a white-looking, blue-eyed black man, the undercover-est brother you are ever likely to meet. I’m the consequence of the love that this dusty cowboy finds so unnatural, the horrible miscegenated thing that results from white women like my mother being made “useless” by black men like my father. So is my wife, a medium-brown black woman. And so are my children, two beautiful light-skinned boys who are black on both sides.
Gremlins
When I found out that I was going to become a father, I suddenly became obsessed with going to college. I promised myself that my children would know that the world is a huge place filled with opportunity and that I’d model this fact by getting a degree myself. So I began attending classes at Santa Monica Community college at night and on the weekends, and after a few semesters, I got a letter inviting me to apply to Columbia University. When I was a young man the idea of going to college struck me as a ridiculous and unattainable fantasy. I don’t think either of my parents graduated from high school, and I only barely did. Now I find myself taking advantage of an opportunity to attend an Ivy League university and to keep the promise I made to myself and my sons before they were even born.
Today, a young white undergrad I befriended during my first semester here texts me to announce that she has decided she wants to have a black baby. Now she wants my advice on how to raise one. There are three rules, I tell her: No bright light, don’t get them wet, and never feed them after midnight, no matter how much they beg. She’s too young to get the reference, but it doesn’t matter.
What are you even asking me? I say. You love them a lot, and you take care of them, what do you think?
No, I mean…how do you raise them to be black? she asks.
You can’t, though, I say. Because you don’t know what that is. Let their father handle it.
Cosmic Latte
I am procrastinating on the Internet. Somewhere amidst my friends’ status updates and the listicles and the news articles I learn that a team from Johns Hopkins University has determined that the average color of the universe is Cosmic Latte, which is to say: beige. If you were to stand outside the cosmos and look back down and into it from a sufficient distance, the beautiful multitude of colors that differentiate all of the objects and gasses and light and radiation contained within it would melt together into one light-beige whole.
So: my children are the color of everything.
Ron Huett graduated from Kurt T. Shery continuation high school in June 1995; he received a B.A. in Creative Writing from Columbia University’s School of General Studies in May 2018. An alumnus of the CRIT writing workshop, Ron teaches 1st grade in Brownsville, Brooklyn.
Photo by Martin_Heigan on Foter.com / CC BY-NC-ND