With her helmet under her arm, Tal heads past the gate and up to my father’s house like she owns it. She is beautiful, my big girl, her feet pointing off at ten and two, slapping straight down on the arch as she falls forward. I watch her walk all the way while I struggle to get the motorcycle’s front wheel up the three steps of the walkway rather than try to unlock the rusty vehicle entrance. Tal, I realize, as I speed through seventeen years of parental epiphanies, is of her own making, not just proof that once I was young and reckless. She turns at the door again to add, “Jesus, hurry the fuck up,” after she uses her own house key for the first time.
“She ran away!” Irv Karp yells out of his car window as he pulls up behind me. I recognize the voice more than I recognize him; first it’s just a crazy man in a 1997 Buick LeSabre.
When he climbs out, he’s sweating, his dress shirt’s open, sleeves rolled up. In the outside light, his old flesh looks translucent and fading. “That little weasel ran away, came here. She didn’t tell you that, did she? Did she?”
“I didn’t know,” I find myself yelling back to match his passion. The bike I give up on, lean it against the fence. Irv takes my hand when I hold it out to him, and I know then it’s not me he’s mad at this time.
“See this? This is what I’ve been dealing with. She just goes. I go to dialysis yesterday, I come back, I lay down. I wake up this morning and she’s gone. Who does that? Is that how good people act? Who just leaves?” he asks and I shrug back at him even though the answer could be, Me.
“I would have thought she was running away to the street and who knows what, but she took that little rat pet thing and its cage. That’s when I knew, she’s coming here. To you. Did you know?”
“I didn’t know,” I tell him again.
“Of course you didn’t know! That’s the immaturity! That’s what kids do! But now you know,” he tells me, smiling at the absurdity of it. And then he breathes. He puts his hands on his khakied thighs, catches air some more. I offer to take him in for some water but he waves me off, stands straight again to continue. “How is she; is she good?”
“She’s good. We found a school, someplace she can finish out her year.” Moments earlier I was thinking about GED training instead, nights at a community college somewhere, but here this guy is and he wants a solid answer. I tell him how it’s in Chestnut Hill and he really likes that because it’s ritzy up there. I tell him it’s surrounded by trees and adjoins Valley Green and he looks impressed, so I skip mood-killing details like the fact that it’s actually in the park and composed of gypsy hovels. I hate the awkwardness of talking about race with white people, so skip the whole mulatto-themed bit altogether.
“Come in, let’s talk this through, figure it out,” I tell him, and I start pushing on the motorcycle again just to get it out of the way. There are a few seconds there when he’s waiting behind me patiently as I struggle, but when I finally get it over the hump Irv doesn’t move.
“Nah,” he tells me, head wagging. “Nah, I’m going out to Philly Park, gonna bet on the puppies. Look, I’m leaving. She’s okay, and she’s going to go back to school? Good. She wants to torture her grandfather, just send emails to my niece to tell me she’s okay? Fine. You keep her. You look out for her. I don’t mean like forever or anything, don’t get carried away, but for now, a couple of weeks at least.”
“I can handle her, Irv. I can. We’re bonding.”
“Yeah. Let’s just see. Seven years I’ve been struggling with this one. Let her think she’s won. Let her think she got her own way. I need the rest. I need a day at the track and some good luck for once. I can’t do this forever. You know I got the prostate cancer. I mean, I got it bad.”
Irv just throws that last bit on to the end without pausing. I reply, “Okay,” before I actually hear his last sentence. But it’s not like I have anything else to say. He looks at my discomfort, laughs at it, waves it away with his big spotty hands as if it’s cigarette smoke.
“Look at your face: it’s like I told you that you got it. You don’t even know me. Trust me, I’m no great loss to the universe. Plus, I’m getting the treatments, so who knows? But don’t tell Tal. She doesn’t know. The two of you, you should come to Shabbat at my place, next Friday. You should meet our family, get to know them so—” And Irv starts coughing like something is in him large and wet that wants to come out, but I hope it doesn’t because I don’t want to see it.
7
MÉLANGE CENTER, 7:55 A.M., cold even though it’s still technically summer. What is a gathering of mulattoes even called? A murder? A motley? A mass? I ask these out loud as Tal and I stand gathered at the gate with the others, waiting for it to open. My daughter says, “A menagerie,” and winks like we’re conspiring.
“It’s called home. Oh yeah, you betcha,” an ebony-skinned woman says next to me in a thick white-girl accent that sounds like it was obtained in North Dakota.
There are mulattoes in America who look white and also socialize as white. White-looking mulattoes whose friends are mostly white, who consume the same music and television and books and films as most whites, whose political views are less than a shade apart from the whites as well. They ain’t here. Those mulattoes whose white appearance matches up with the white world they inhabit, those mulattoes aren’t coming to Mulattopia. The world already fits well enough for them.
Those mulattoes who look definitively African American and are fully at home within the African American community — they aren’t here either. Those mulattoes who look clearly black and hang black and are in the full embrace of black culture — nope, they’re not here, nowhere to be found. If they were they would denounce this lot of sellouts. I know they would. I can hear them from the place they have in my consciousness.
The people whose appearance matches the identity they project, they have a place in society that they fit into with minimal cramping. But here, standing next to us, is everyone else. The human equivalent of mismatched socks. The people whose racial appearance fails to mirror the ethnicity of their inner spirit.
They’re going to let me teach three days a week, push my reduced payments off till Halloween, when I should have access to the rest of my dad’s modest cashable accounts. I’m looking forward to a whole week of training with Tal, us sitting together making fun of the cultists in the back of the classroom, me and my teenage baby girl, bonding. But as soon as the blond Neanderthal comes to open the gate, Sunita appears right behind him, reading names off a list. And just like that my daughter and I are separated, broken off into two groups, and sent to sit in trailer homes at opposite ends of the encampment.
There are a dozen other people sitting around a circular table in the room for Balance Class B, and nobody knows each other yet so nobody is talking or making eye contact. But I am looking at them. And I am looking at some of the whitest-looking black people on the face of the planet. The only reason I know some of them are black is because they’re in this room. I look at these people — a couple adults my age, the rest kids Tal’s age and younger — and I come to the most blissful recognition. I am the darkest Negro in the room.
I am the darkest Negro in the room.
Finally. I — lighter than some white people walking around this world, always the palest of any black person, a man who can barely hold on to that mantle — am like an Asante chief in this room. The aspirational blackness of this group is clear in their aesthetic choices. The teenage boy to my left wears a do-rag, presumably so you do-not see the straight brown strands peeking out from around his ears. He has on the basketball jersey of a player most famous for being associated with the reality-TV star to whom he was briefly married. Next to him is a woman whose African braids must have been attached to her stringy mouse-brown hair with superglue. These people, they are not black like me. They are less black than me, and therefore I don’t trust them. And I love it. Embattled groups have to police membership, for their own self-protection. But with policing comes power, and all power’s usual intoxicants. Instantly, my own ethnic bona fides are shored up by the contrast to my present company. This, I realize, is a singular element of the Black Experience I’ve been previously denied. The guilty satisfaction of sitting in judgment over others for their insufficient blackness. I forgive everyone who has ever done this to me maliciously. How could anyone resist such a pleasurable self-righteous indulgence!