—
We ride to Mélange. Partly because Tal is insisting on it. And partly because I’m a lonely man who saw a person he keeps thinking about and wants to know why. Every time my motor idles, I yell to Tal all about “mixed” people. They are black people who hate being black, and the only reason they don’t try to be white is that whites folks won’t have them. That’s one red light. They are color-struck brown-bag-clubbers, from the days when you had to be lighter than a brown bag to be admitted. That’s at a stop sign. And African Americans have always been racially mixed, most of us are also of Native American and European ancestry. Even the name, African American instead of African, implies this. But that’s not good enough for them. They just want to be special. They’re self-hating Negroes, Oreos who will do anything to distance themselves from their race. That’s while filling up the gas. Tal yells “Okay” every time I finish a sentence, yells even when the motor’s off. She even repeats my words back to me, stripped of nuance or any attempt at understanding.
When we get to the address it seems like none of this might matter anyway. Her little phone says Wolcott Drive but the digits don’t match up. It’s an odd number and there are no odd numbers on this side of the street, just trees. We’re by the park, Valley Green. “Nothing,” I say and she just pinches my back and tells me to keep driving. I go up and down the street. I go on the other end of the road where there are a few stately homes, and show her they are on the even-numbered side, to prove my point. I’m disappointed, too, for my own reasons.
Maybe that woman was going to save me.
“The Umoja School won’t be that bad,” I say.
“Everyone kept staring at me,” Tal says.
“It’ll be a good learning experience,” I say.
“They were all wondering, ‘What the hell’s the white girl doing here?’ ” Tal says.
“They’ll get used to you. You’ll get used to it. I have,” I tell her. I haven’t. Tal’s silent. “Come on, let’s go shopping, my treat. I’ll buy you your dashiki.”
“Oh my God, please. Please keep looking,” Tal says, but I can hear that even she knows the truth, that there is nothing out here. And that’s the truth; there’s nothing out there. The Umoja School will be okay. She’ll go. I’ll make her go, or I’ll kick her out. At least I’ll threaten to, and since Irv already did, maybe she won’t call my bluff. I give one more pass to show her it’s hopeless, drive all the way down to where the street dead ends. Nothing here but fourteen hundred acres of part of the largest urban woods in America. I point to the trees, tell her if it were here, we’d see it, then kick the gear down from neutral when Tal says, “There!”
A sign. It’s handmade, painted. It says, THE MÉLANGE CENTER FOR MULTIRACIAL LIFE. It looks like the worst hippie art project of 1972. But Tal is already off the bike, climbing up the deer path through the woods.
I kill the motor, follow her. I call, but she doesn’t stop. The path is steep, but Tal’s shooting forward, using her lanky legs until she’s over the lip and gone from me. There’s a moment of panic, fear that I’ve already lost her. In the woods. But when I get to the top of the hill Tal’s standing there, in front of a gate. It’s metal, new, temporary, still has the fencing company tags along the side of it. Past it are mobile trailers, and the summer hum of belabored air-conditioning. I don’t see anyone though, and before I can tell Tal this is clearly a mistake, that we should leave, she starts yelling. “Hello! Hello!” She keeps saying it. Tal is loud; she sounds scared. And she is, she’s scared I’m going to send her to the Umoja School. But whatever’s in her voice sets a couple of the trailer doors opening, and some brown people emerge and start walking toward us. And one white guy. He’s an ogre. Seven feet tall, easy. And he has blond dreadlocks. Doesn’t anyone comb their hair anymore? Damn near albino pale with his yellow hair matted together in thick rolls that shoot off loose and straight at the end like a dog’s tail.
“Yo cuz, can we help you?” he asks and it’s more of a demand than inquiry. The giant’s close enough that we can see the pale blue of his eyes and read his T-shirt. It says Malcolm&Garvey&Huey&George. “This is a private area, my man. If you here to see someone, you best name—”
“Warren Duffy!” My name interrupts him. But I don’t say it. It comes from a woman. She’s tall, her sable mane tied up behind her head, the large glasses resting on her nose, her face’s most prominent feature. I watch as she walks off one of the trailer’s little porches, carrying rolls of rubber mats under one arm and a gaggle of hula hoops in the other. Look at that, her sandals, they still clap for her.
I smile, wave, yell out, “Hi, so good to see you again,” but she just looks annoyed in my direction.
When she gets to the gate she says, “Look at that. The world’s biggest sunflower has come to bloom.”
6
RUSTY OLD TRAILERS, decomposing in the woods. There are different kinds of trailers — travel trailers with monotonous white ruffled siding, drab gray business ones the size of shipping containers, shiny aluminum ones shaped like suppositories. There’s even a row of mobile homes that look like Victorian houses for oversized dolls, lined up side by side on the grass in imitation of a town house block. But that’s it. Some moldy circus tents, but they just add to the feeling of bohemian impermanence. A good breeze and it’s all gone.
“I assure you, we are very well funded, and have already begun building an endowment,” the center’s director tells me. As soon as we’re introduced, she asks me to call her Roslyn, or Director Roslyn, but she doesn’t give me her last name. “A literal building is the next step.”
“But this is a public park, right?” It’s totally a public park. It’s owned by the City of Philadelphia.
“There’s an ongoing litigation.” She smiles calmly, the patience of a mother enjoying childlike naïveté.
It’s hard to tell Roslyn’s age because she’s clearly fit and wrinkle-free, and conventionally attractive, but from the full white of her hair I know she’s almost a generation older than me. She shows me her world and I look around this place thinking, Is it free? If not, can I afford it? But all I ask her is, “What’s a ‘sunflower’?”
“A ‘sunflower’? Where did you hear that? That’s a horrible word.”
“It’s a beautiful flower. You can eat it too.”
“Yellow on the outside, brown on the inside. A slang term for a biracial person who denies their mixed nature, only recognizing their black identity.” Roslyn turns her head to look over at me as we slowly walk down the wooded path, as if I’m the source of the etymology. “I don’t allow use of that word here. The Mélange Center is about inclusion of all perspectives of the black and white, mixed-race experience. Our goal is to overcome the conflict of binary. To find the sacred balance.”
“The sacred balance,” I say back to her, to prove I’m listening.
“The sacred balance. An equilibrium that allows you to live a life that expresses all of who you are and hide none of it,” she says, and she keeps talking. I look at her and offer an occasional “Yes” and smile, but mostly I watch my daughter across the lawn with that first biracial militant I encountered. She’s taller than Tal. Much thicker. How can any grown straight man become infatuated with teens when there are women walking this earth? With cellulite and stretch marks because they’re actually living?
“Oh. Sunita.” The director follows my eyes. “Sun is a miracle, really, my little soul sister. But when you get called names your whole life, it’s easy to revert to doing the same.”