Caucasia Read online

  One evening, Cole and I lay side-by-side on our big brass bed after dinner. Our bellies were full, and the swelter of the day still stuck to us. We lay with our heads toward the foot of the bed, our legs in the air, as we rubbed our feet against the cool white surface of the wall, leaving black smears from the dirt on our soles. We could hear our parents fighting through the heating vent. Muted obscenities. You pompous prick. You fat white mammy. We were trying to block them out with talk of Elemeno. Cole was explaining to me that it wasn’t just a language, but a place and a people as well. I had heard this before, but it never failed to entertain me, her description of the land I hoped to visit some day. We whispered questions and answers to each other like calls to prayer. shimbala matamba caressi. nicolta fo mo capsala. The Elemenos, she said, could turn not just from black to white, but from brown to yellow to purple to green, and back again. She said they were a shifting people, constantly changing their form, color, pattern, in a quest for invisibility. According to her, their changing routine was a serious matter—less a game of make-believe than a fight for the survival of their species. The Elemenos could turn deep green in the bushes, beige in the sand, or blank white in the snow, and their power lay precisely in their ability to disappear into any surrounding. As she spoke, a new question—a doubt—flashed through my mind. Something didn’t make sense. What was the point of surviving if you had to disappear? I said it aloud—peta marika vandersa?— but just then the door to our room flew open.

  It was our mother. She wore a flowered muumuu from Zayres and her blond hair piled into a loose bun. Lately she’d been acting funny. She was distracted, spending hours on end in the basement. I didn’t really understand what went on down there. It was a grown-up land, where my mother held her hushed Sunday meetings with her friends. They would disappear from noon till just before dinner time, and Cole and I were absolutely forbidden, at all times, to go near them. Cole thought they must be smoking pot. I thought it was where my mother hid our Christmas presents. Whatever the case, the door was locked and there was no way around it.

  Our mother stood still for a moment in the doorway, arms folded across her chest. “Kiddos, get up. Change into something a little nicer. Your father wants to take you to your aunt Dot’s house.”

  “What for?” Cole asked, already up and heading toward the closet.

  My mother crossed the room. She was a big woman, in both directions, and looked like a giant as she stepped over our toys, hunching low so her head wouldn’t hit the ceiling. She stared out the window with a grim expression.

  “Dot’s going away. Far away. And she wants to say good-bye.”

  I sat up with a start, feeling a twinge of panic. Dot was my father’s younger sister and my favorite grown-up. She was two shades darker than my father, a cool, rich brown verging on black, with no breasts to speak of, long legs, and a gap between her two front teeth. She liked to dress like a boy, in overalls or low-slung blue jeans, and wore her hair in a short, neat natural. Her real name was Dorothy, but her mother had shortened it when Dot was just a girl.

  Dot was the only relative we knew on our father’s side of the family. The grandmother on that side remained a mystery to me. We always referred to her as Nana, to distinguish her from our white one, who was always Grandma. Nana had died when I was still a baby and Cole was three. Cole claims to remember her. She says Nana taught her, at that young age, to have an appreciation for coffee (she would give it to Cole with a dollop of sweetened condensed milk, so it was like coffee ice cream). I was jealous of those memories. All I had was Dot, and now she was leaving.

  “She’s going to India,” my mother explained, still frowning at the street. “To the mountains, to stay with some religious guru of hers. Probably a bunch of nuts. I doubt it’ll last long, but it’s not clear. She claims she’s gone for good. Anyway, hurry up. Your father’s already outside.”

  I asked my mother why she wasn’t coming. She didn’t go to many parties anymore. She said she didn’t have time for boogying. She had rallies to attend, and dyslexic students to teach, and secret meetings in the basement. But this party seemed different. Important, from the sounds of it. I knew she liked Dot and would want to say good-bye. I stood beside her and followed her gaze to the street, where my father’s orange Volvo sat parked. “You should come,” I said.

  She looked tense and shook her head. “No, baby. I’ve already said my good-bye to Dotty. Besides, there are gonna be people there I don’t want to see. Now hurry the hell up. You’re late.”

  Before we kissed her good-bye, she mumbled: “Tell that bastard to have you home before midnight.”

  My father wasn’t alone. Beside him in the passenger seat was his sidekick, Ronnie Parkman, a strikingly handsome man with high cheekbones and deep-set eyes. We clambered into the back of the car. As we rolled toward Roxbury, my father and Ronnie talked politics in the front. Earth, Wind, and Fire crooned from the radio, and my father tapped his hand to the beat against the steering wheel. You’re a shining star, No matter who you are, shining bright to see, what you can truly be…

  My father always spoke differently around Ronnie. He would switch into slang, peppering his sentences with words like “cat” and “man” and “cool.” Whenever my mother heard him talking that way, she would laugh and say it was his “jive turkey act.” In the past year, he had discovered Black Pride (just a few years later than everyone else), and my mother said he was trying to purge himself of his “honkified past.”

  As we made our way down Humboldt Avenue, my father glanced over his shoulder, smiling at us. “Birdie, Cole, do your papa a favor,” he said. “Yell, ‘Ngawa, Ngawa, Black, Black Powah!’ at those two cats on the corner.” He pointed to two young men who stood in front of a barbershop, and muttered to Ronnie, “Check them out. Nypical tiggers, wasting their lives away.”

  Ronnie chuckled and repeated my father’s phrase. “‘Nypical tiggers.’ Deck, man, you’re crazy.”

  Cole and I stuck our heads out the window and mimicked the chant at the corner men, who raised their fists in a half-serious salute. I thought it was fun, my head being hit by the wind of the moving car. “Ngawa, Ngawa, Black, Black Powah!” we yelled again in unison, this time at a neat, churchgoing old lady with salt-and-pepper hair. She stopped in her path and scowled at us as we passed by. My father tried to stifle his laughter and ordered us to sit down.

  He explained to his friend, “Dot’s flaky. Always has been, always will be. Ever since we were little kids she’s had her head in the clouds. This latest silliness doesn’t surprise me one damn bit.”

  Ronnie sighed. “Yeah, Dotty sure knows how to pick them.”

  My father went on, more insistent than usual. He seemed to be trying to get a reaction out of Ronnie. “She sleeps with these white boys, then acts surprised when they don’t take her home for dinner. I told her, these ofays just want their thirty minutes of difference.”

  I was pretty sure “ofay” meant white, and without really thinking, I piped from the backseat, “Isn’t Mum ofay?”

  I heard Cole snicker into her hand beside me.

  My father threw me a sharp look. “Yeah, but that’s different.”

  “How?”

  He sighed, about to launch into a long explanation, when Ronnie began to laugh, low and softly, beside him. “Kids are too smart for their own good. Always gotta watch your back.”

  My father broke into laughter, too, and forgot to answer my question.

  DOT LIVED ON the border of Roxbury and Jamaica Plain in a large communal household that grew all of its own vegetables and marijuana in the backyard and was governed by a Hindu philosophy. Usually, no one was allowed to wear shoes beyond the front door. But tonight must have been extra special, because when Dot opened the door, I saw she wore high white platforms and a tight, bright-yellow minidress. Around her head she had tied an orange-and-purple African cloth that made her look regal. She smelled smoky, foreign already, as she wrapped Cole and me in her arms. She held us away fr
om her then, to examine us.

  “If it isn’t the terrible twosome. Give your auntie a kiss. Look at you two, so grown. Hot damn, Cole, check you out.” She spun Cole around in her hands, then said to my father with a wink, “Watch out there, big daddy. She’s gonna be a heartbreaker.”

  Dot hugged my father and his friend then, and kissed them both on each cheek. She seemed unable to stop smiling, full of possibility, as she led us into the dim crowded house, where people lounged around the main room in a swirl of colors, conversation, and smoke. I heard my father whisper to Ronnie, “Check it out. Welcome to the land of miscegenation.”

  On the couch, a man with a frizzy brown beard and glasses was giving a back rub to a petite dark-skinned woman, while a Puerto Rican wearing a Red Sox cap backward sat beside them, rolling a joint. A red-haired woman sat cross-legged on the couch, nursing a baby at her bare breast, while an small Indian man sat before her on the floor, waving his arms in excited conversation. My father and Ronnie went into a corner to get beers, then stood perched, watching the crowd with critical stares, whispering to each other from time to time. I stood by the doorjamb watching, transfixed, light-headed from the haze of reefer fumes that sifted toward me.

  When I reached beside me for Cole’s hand, I felt only air. I was alone. This was always happening to me, in grocery stores, in movie theaters, in crowds. I would wander off, mesmerized by the sight of some oddity—a burned man’s face, a dog with three legs, a Biblethumping evangelist whom everyone else ignored. My mother said that one of these days she was going to get me a leash. Cole was usually the one to find me, on the verge of tears, having realized the danger of my folly.

  Cole and Dot had wandered off somewhere. They probably assumed I was close behind. I went down the long hallway in search of them.

  The house once had belonged to a family of Hasidic Jews. They had fled Roxbury when it began to change colors, and the building had sat empty and rotting for years until Dot and her motley crew took it upon themselves to restore it. They had been slowly reconstructing the house through lazy Saturdays of hammering, sanding, and painting. But still it had the feeling of a half-finished funhouse. All the floors tilted at an angle, and someone had painted a mural on the long first floor, a row of blissful Indian faces—the disciples of Ramakrishna—women and men with glazed eyes and knowing smiles. The painting was unfinished, and the last disciple, a young woman, was eyebrowless. The mural always had frightened me a bit, and that night I felt a chill as I traced the shape of Ramakrishna’s nose with the tip of my finger before moving on through the house.

  There were mysteries to be uncovered behind the closed doors that lined the hall, and I turned my attention to the first door, which was open a crack. Angry voices carried out into the hallway. I peeked in. A couple sat on the bed. The woman, a thin white girl with strawberry-blond hair and freckles, was crying. The man wore his hair in a wide, light-brown afro with a headband splitting it in half. He sat beside the girl and said into the air, “You just don’t understand. I was trying to help a sister out.”

  The girl didn’t seem to be listening.

  “You fucked her, didn’t you?” she hissed. Her makeup was smeared and bright like a clown’s, and snot was running down into her lips.

  “Julie, don’t ask questions if you don’t want the answers,” he told her, shaking his head and looking at the floor.

  “You motherfuckers are all alike! All alike!”

  She started putting on her jacket, and her eye caught mine.

  I stopped breathing, ready to run. But she just sniffled and began sobbing all over again.

  I wondered why she couldn’t see me, and felt a thrill of anonymity, invisibility, all of a sudden. I wandered away, wondering what else I might find.

  I went on like that for a few more rooms, in one finding nothing but clothes strewn across an unmade bed, in another finding four grown-ups giggling madly as they passed a bong around. I was beginning to get bored and to worry where Cole was, when I reached the door at the end of the hall.

  It was sealed tight. I had to push hard to open it, but finally it gave.

  The light inside was dim, and the room smelled of sweat and cigarette smoke. Books lined the walls, and a desk sat at the far end. It was a strangely conservative room, which stood out from the ethnic and ragtag decor of the rest of the house. It looked somber, like the library in my grandmother’s house. But here, a group of men with their backs to me were bent around the desk in an excited huddle, whispering, and letting out little hoots of laughter. I suspected that it was a private meeting and that I should leave. But I wanted to test whether I was really invisible. It was a feeling that thrilled me even as it scared me. I was curious about what all the men were looking at. I opened the door just a little farther, but it let out a loud creak, and one of the men with his back toward me turned in a violent motion.

  I had seen him before, though I couldn’t place where. Then I remembered. He had come knocking at our door one night a few weeks before. My father had been spending the night away, at a friend’s house in Roxbury, but my mother had been at home. I had found them out on the porch together, smoking and laughing, when I came to ask my mother for ice cream. I remember thinking he looked almost like a white man, barely a trace of black at all, except for his tight reddish-brown curls. He had smiled at me and winked and said to my mother, “That your little girl?”

  Now he was kneeling in front of me, staring at me with gray-blue eyes, and I stood still as stone under his gaze.

  He smiled, and I saw that his teeth were crooked and crowded so that they folded over one another. He had a reddish fuzz over his lip.

  “Hey, girl, whatcha lookin’ at?”

  I shrugged and moved to turn away. But I felt his hand squeezing into my arm—tight.

  A voice behind him said, “Redbone, man, get rid of that little girl.”

  But the man turned toward them, still clutching my arm, and said, laughing, “Nigga, this ain’t no ordinary little girl. This be Sandy Lee’s little girl. Ain’t that right?”

  I frowned at him. His slang was awkward and twisted. It didn’t seem to come naturally to him. Even I could see that. It reminded me of an old black-and-white plantation movie my father had forced Cole and me to watch one Sunday afternoon. The slave characters in it had been played by white actors who wore some kind of pancake makeup on their faces. My father had laughed whenever they spoke in their strained dialect. Redbone sounded as if he had graduated from the same school of acting.

  I glanced over his head at the group. They were blocking my view to the desk.

  He laughed. “Girl, you wanna see what’s on the desk?”

  I stared at him for a moment. I was aching to see, but hesitated, instead looking at one of the men, a friend of my father’s, who smiled softly at me, as if he felt sorry for me.

  “Yeah, let me see,” I said, knowing I would get in trouble for this one, but too curious to care.

  Redbone picked me up in his arms in one swift motion. He smelled like sweat, and there were yellow stains, like piss in snow, creeping out from his underarms.

  He hauled me over to the desk.

  I looked down to see two large rifles, black and shiny, cradled on top of a couple of pillows. They looked like twin sleeping dogs lying there.

  Redbone whispered in my ear, “You know what those be?”

  “Guns.” I leaned forward in his arms to touch one, but he held me back.

  “Naw, you don’t want to get too close, baby girl. I’d have to teach you how to use it first.”

  One of the men said, “Redbone, why you showing her this, man? Isn’t this a security risk?”

  But Redbone was still staring at me. I was trying to hold my breath, trying not to smell him.

  “This little girl ain’t no security risk, brotha. We gotta raise our children to know how to fight. There’s a war going on. We can’t be raisin’ no sissies. We got pigs in the White House and pigs patrolling the street. Know what I’m
sayin’, Birdie Lee?”

  I tried to squirm out of his arms. Something about the way he had said my name felt wrong. Too familiar.

  The other men looked uncomfortable.

  Just then the door swung open, letting in a burst of joyful chatter from the party. We all turned to see who it was.

  My father stepped in with Ronnie. They were laughing and carrying beers. He froze when he saw Redbone holding me.

  I yelled, “Papa! Over here!” and put out my arms toward him.

  But he didn’t move. He was staring at Redbone with a thin-lipped smile. Everyone was quiet as he slowly handed Ronnie his beer bottle.

  Then his voice came out: “What the fuck do you think you’re doing holding my daughter over those guns?”

  Redbone laughed again, a strained, unhappy laugh, his voice breaking. But he put me down, and I ran over to my father, turning now to stare back at Redbone with my hands on my hips.

  “Deck, man, don’t be gettin’ like that. She came in here on her own free will, and I just showin’ her what we was doin’.” He paused, and a queer, rather miserable smile came over his face as he said, “Maybe you need to get your head out of them books and put some action behind them high-falutin’ theories of yours.”

  But my father was leaning over Redbone then, standing so close to him, towering over him, though they were the same height. “Don’t tell me ’bout the revolution, you fake-ass half-breed motherfucker.”

  The other men crowded around, pulling them apart, laughing nervously, saying, “C’mon, y’all, we’re brothers, ain’t no need to fight.”

  “This ain’t no brother. Where did this fool come from, anyway? Can someone tell me that? He shows up a month ago actin’ like he been a revolutionary all his life. But no one knows where you came from, Red, do they?” my father bellowed.