“Hell no. Feels like it’s time to go. And I’m not going to leave you here with the ghouls.”
“They’re not ghoulish. They just want to be known,” Tal tells me. And she’s not kidding.
“That’s some crazy ish you’re talking, honey. Get your shoes on. We were supposed to leave for the museum ten minutes ago.”
“Not yet. I want you to look at something.”
“Honey, get your bag, get your phone, let’s go. If you want to get clothes from Irv’s first, we got to go.”
“You’re rushing me and that makes me feel like you don’t respect me,” Tal recites, and makes no move except to fold her arms.
“Fine. What?”
“Before we go gawk at other people’s art, I want to show you something. My own art project. I’ve been working on it all week. I want you to see it. And I don’t want you to just say nice things. I want you to be frank, Pops. Like the kind of critiques you give Kimet.”
I grab my coat but follow her to her tent, wait outside as she goes poking around behind the canvas. “I thought you were all about dance. You’re a painter now?”
“Sculptor,” Tal says, and pushes it out in front me, resting it on the top of a stool. “I’m starting to believe that, like, ‘found object sculpture’ is my secondary medium, you know? I’m thinking, maybe not college? Maybe art school would be better for me? In Philly. Eventually.”
It’s my Frederick Douglass action figure. I use it in class as a body model. I know where she found it: in my cabinet drawer. Since Mélange’s relocation, I’ve kept all my art materials in the house. She’s stripped the doll down to a naked body. And it’s truly a naked body, because Tal’s compensated for the natural neutering of male dolls by adding a prosthetic penis to his groin. Oh great. It’s not erect or anything, but she’s been fairly generous.
Amazingly, Frederick Douglass’s cock is not the most startling aspect of Tal’s work. She’s painted him white. No, she’s painted half of him, right down the middle, pink. Pink and tan and white, the skin of a Viking in the dark winter months. The redness hints at those parts of his body where the blood runs closest to the epidermis. Oh, and his hair. It pains me to see it. Frederick Douglass is the Samson of African American history; his Afro basically freed the slaves. Here though, on what used to be my doll, half of that hair has been shaved off. Replaced with a flat blond mane just as voluminous.
“I got it off an old Barbie doll,” Tal says when I go to touch it.
“Yeah. Okay.” There’s my trepidation; Tal hears it. I’m holding the doll, looking all around it as if the answer for how I feel about this could be found there. Tal goes to take the sculpture out of my hands, then stops herself.
“It’s suppose to offend, you know that, right? I mean, you’re supposed to look at it, and go, ‘What the hell is that?’ Then, after you do that, hopefully you ask yourself, ‘Why does this piss me off?’ Is it because black history types are considered, like, saints? Or is it the fact that this points out that he was half-white. Because he was, you know?”
“Genetically. Half-European. Whiteness — that’s not really something you can be half of. That’s more of an all or nothing privilege, perspective thing.”
“You know what I’m saying, Pops.” Tal yanks it out of my hand. I think the penis is going to fall off, but no, it’s really stuck on there. She lays it on the table, on a fleece blanket. Tenderly wrapping it up, it looks like she’s swaddling a baby. “You still haven’t said anything. And saying nothing is actually even more shitty than saying something you’ll regret later.”
“I’m offended by it,” I tell Tal, calm. “And then I wonder why I’m offended by it. And it makes me think on that. And I know, I mean I am pretty damn sure, that my reasoning is probably a lot different from what you’re thinking about it, but it is making me think. So it’s working.”
Tal stops packing it away, but when I finish talking, she starts up again. “Cool,” is all Tal says.
I hug my daughter from behind, kiss her on her head. “Ice cold,” I say.
She repeats what I say right after me. “Ice cold.” This makes me feel like I’m starting to do damn good as a daddy.
“I mean, I know you’re a failed comic-book artist, but since you’re my parental unit I value your opinion,” Tal tells me.
And this pisses me off the whole ride to Irv’s apartment. I already know I’m a failure. That doesn’t mean I want to be called a failure by any voice not in my head. Certainly not by my own daughter. The fact that, again, I know I’m a failure, just infuriates me further. I grip the wheel. I get to the turn for the highway but I take the long, beautiful way instead, and it’s a damn nice day and I should enjoy it. But I’m still pissed off. Winding down the Wissahickon’s stream, out onto the Schuylkill River. It gives me time to take in the green space and the water and reflect on just how pissed off I am.
“It’s so funny. Last August you were basically a white girl. It was all, ‘the blacks’ then, remember? Not even a year later and you’re another Mulatta Militant,” is the first thing I say, after a while.
“Jews aren’t really ‘white,’ in the racial sense,” Tal informs me, looking out the window so she doesn’t see the self-restraint it takes for me not to immediately respond.
“I still can’t believe you never went to the African American Museum. The whole time you were growing up in Philly. I guess white people just don’t go to black museums.” I thought I was changing the subject. Even when I stop talking, I think, thank God I changed the goddamn subject.
“Well, who’s fucking fault is it I grew up around only white people?”
“Mine,” I say. Then, “Don’t say ‘fuck.’ To your father.”
I don’t say any more till we hit the Parkway. Past the art museum, past Logan Circle. I was going to tell her a story, about how my dad’s family came to this part of the city from Ireland almost two hundred years ago, how they lived around this neighborhood until the 1950s, when the GI Bill allowed them to slip into the middle class. Driving past the natural history museum, I was going to tell the story of how my dad would take me to see the dinosaur bones, because I liked the idea of a world without humans and because he liked that it was free on Saturdays. I don’t say anything, though. As we’re stopped at a red light, our eyes meet for a second when Tal realizes I’m looking at her, then I have a green so I turn and sigh.
“You hated my sculpture,” Tal tells me. The damn two-toned cock monster is still sitting on her lap.
“I didn’t hate your piece, honey. It’s just, when you create art about race, about blackness, you have to deal with the historical weight of the images that came before. You have to understand the ways art was used to diminish us, to dehumanize us. To negotiate all that, you have be informed, not just artistically, but also culturally. You can’t just bludgeon the concept with heavy-handed imagery.”
“Sun loved it. Sun said it was, ‘as brutal as it was insightful.’ ” Tal pauses for effect, nods her head a few seconds after she finishes to make sure it’s sunk into my head. “I hate to say this, Father, but I think you’re responding this way because of me saying that you’re an ex-comic-book artist—”
“You said, ‘failed.’ ”
“I meant ex—”
“Daughter, I’m not an ‘ex-’ anything. I’m an artist. An illustrator. And I do comics. I don’t know if you noticed, but I’ve been kind of busy of late. Mostly with you.”
“Which I only said because I haven’t really seen you do any work the whole time I’ve known you.”
“You’ve only known me for a few months.” I say it. Instantly, I hate that I say it. The guy that says that, he’s a huge asshole. Three more blocks. Then I park the car. Illegally, in the tow-away zone. We’re at Irv’s corner anyway. Once the Bug is shut off, I turn to apologize to her, but Tal’s already got the door open. “Tal! I told Tosha we’d be there now. Hurry!”