The blond Neanderthal comes into the classroom. I have a moment of panic that I’m going to have to take a week of lectures from Thor the Thunder Mulatto, but he sits down next to me. I can see his dreads close up and marvel at how a man who looks so white can have hair kinky enough to hold them. And then I almost chuckle when I can see that his thick strands are held together by some sort of product. Egg whites or wax, or more likely some organic paste that comes in a jar with a lot of little Africas or ankhs or marijuana leaves decorating its sides.
“One drop,” he says when he catches me looking. I smile and look at him. And then he says it again, “One drop.” And I know he’s calling me out. Amazingly, all of my air vacates and is replaced with something the opposite of helium. Just like that. The familiarity of this next emotion’s so complete that it takes only a moment to accomplish. Here I have sat in judgment, yet am no better. One drop of African blood, the legal definition of blackness in America. And really, look at me, am I much better? Does the wideness of my nose or my full lips somehow obscure the fact that I hold to this ridiculous fallacy as well? I am more ashamed for having forgotten this at the first opportunity. And when he says, “ ‘One Drop,’ like the Marley song. What do you go by?” holding his hand out for me to shake it, and I get that he’s giving me his name. That he’s actually telling me that he’s willfully chosen to call himself this insult.
“Warren,” I say. But can’t resist asking, “You really like to be called One Drop?”
“They used to tease me with the name, when I was a young boy coming up. Now, I own it. And it can’t hurt me since it ain’t true. You feel me, Dubs?” he says, then offers me a fist bump, which is a nice way to accentuate that he understands the unspoken rule that any brother with a W anywhere in their name has the opportunity of choosing “Dubs” as a nickname. He has studied the culture well. I give a pound in appreciation.
“Don’t be nervous, yo. First day jitters, but it ain’t nothing. It goes quickly,” One Drop tells me. He says it like he truly knows, like this isn’t just conspiratorial bluster.
“You took one of these classes before?”
“Man, I’ve taken this jawn three times. My blackness runs too deep, yo,” he says, putting a fist over his heart. “See, they make you take it till they whitewash you, yo. But the teacher, she’s the best.” And when Sunita Habersham walks in and authoritatively takes the front of the table, I turn to agree with him.
—
I stare at Sun, but she’s the teacher, and she’s lecturing, so it’s perfectly appropriate. So she likes comics. So she’s height-weight proportionate, in a manner I find voluptuous. Yes, she’s displayed an unattainability that enhances her attractiveness to me. But still, rational thought here, what am I being attracted to? All those reasons are so petty, my desire doesn’t accrue from their sum. I look at her neck. It’s got all those lines running across. She’s a little younger than me and blessed with more melanin, so those aren’t wrinkles, its the skin of her neck being too long for the bones holding up her solid, monumental head. The size of it eludes perception because of the distracting oversized glasses masking a third of her face.
The enormous concave lenses shrink her eyes down to the size of a small child’s. Her pupils are two little brown dots floating in empty aquariums. If Sunita Habersham wore contact lenses, they be as thick as Russel Wright plates. Sun could swim at the bottom of the ocean with contacts that solid. She is not attractive in pieces, but what human is? She is the most beautiful tall, half-black, female comic-book nerd in the world, of this I have no doubt. The whole is what matters. And she is whole and balanced. She must be or the blasphemy that she’s preaching would shake her to the ground.
“Without accepting all of ourselves, we can never be ourself,” Sunita declares. And then she repeats the sentence of import over again, slower, stopping to write on the board. I haven’t been closely following her actual lecture, the entire line of discussion is too disturbing to take in big chunks. Fortunately, I don’t really need to because Sun’s done the same thing with all her key sentences and they’re all written up there. Love yourself for who you are, not who you wish you were. Then there’s All of your history is within you. My favorite is You are half of nothing, for you are whole, because ain’t no one in this room half of anything. These people would kill to be half. Nobody in this room has had an ancestor who was “half” since Abraham Lincoln was president. Hell, the guy next to me is making do clinging to one drop and bragging about it. This mixed race stuff is heresy. It’s the opposite of what I’ve been taught since a child: if you have any black in you, you’re black — very simple, very American. It’s worked fine since slavery but she treats the dogma like doggerel.
For two hours, I’m nodding my head and taking notes, mostly listing how to get Loudin done in six months, the order of what needs to be fixed, and estimates as to what each repair will cost. They don’t have to be good repairs, just enough to get the appraisal higher for after the fire when the insurance pays out. When I reach an enormous, impossible sum, I look up, surprised. Sun sees this and she actually smiles, mistaking my revelation as a response to something in her lecture she is calling “tri-racial isolates.”
Sun says, “We’re writing our parental histories?” and I look at the others and they’ve got they’re notebooks open and are jotting, so I ape them.
I start with my mom. Pauline Duffy, née Skaggs, who came from Chicago in the late sixties, running from an alcoholic father who only sobered up to preach on Sundays and to push a mop at the post office on weekday mornings. While he was drunk, he did some things too horrific to specify, to her, at night, and she had a hard time overcoming those memories, which is partly why my mom smoked a lot, which cut her time on earth to deal with said trauma. The name Skaggs came from his father, who showed up in Chicago running away from certain lynching in Acadia Parish, Louisiana, leaving behind the corpse of a drunken Cajun who overestimated his white privilege. I can’t trace them all the way back to Africa, but I do know that his grandfather came from Haiti in the beginning of the nineteenth century — as to why he would chose to go from free Haiti to the Deep South before the end of U.S. slavery, I don’t know. I do know that creoles can be hardheaded, so maybe that’s reason enough. The rest of the family, my grandmother’s side, came from Tennessee, where they worked for the same family they’d been enslaved by for another twenty years after the South lost its war. When my mom left my dad, money was tight. Bills went unpaid, and utilities routinely went out. Light’s out. Water’s out. Heat’s out. When it was the water bill, we’d line buckets in the backyard to have rainwater to flush the toilets with. Sometimes it was the phone, which meant that when we got home my mom would spend all night talking to me, which was lovely. Sometimes it was the gas, which wasn’t bad because we only used it to cook and that meant cereal for dinner. But usually it was the electric. We’d get back from work and school and it would be dark and stay dark. And my mom would get candles from the dresser drawer and ignite a cave of visibility for us. She was a skinny woman, skeletal in the shadows, but they were soft bones to me. Mornings there was no heat and too much cold, she would come downstairs and turn on the oven to take the chill out, leave its door open so you could see the hot air rippling as it escaped. And we would stay there at the counter, hands over the opening, Mom taking pauses to light her menthols on the burner. “Love keeps us warm,” she said to me once, which was not literally true or particularly poetic but is lodged forever in my mind.