BOOK A BIG BAND

“Don’t you wish you were white?”

She was older than me. Tall and blond, with short hair like Julie Andrews’s. Her parents were downstairs talking to my parents, and when she asked me the question, which no one else had ever posed to me, she said it as if it was my chance to finally come clean. She was standing at the foot of my bed holding the Tuesday Taylor doll whose head spun around so that sometimes she could be a blonde and other times a brunette.

I knew instinctively that the answer must be “No,” which is what I told her.

“Really?” she asked back. “Not even sometimes?” Her insistence told me she thought I was lying.

I didn’t give myself time to reflect because I had some sense of what was riding on my answer, but before I spoke, I let out a quick laugh intended to prove how silly, how utterly foolish she was to even ask.

“No. Never.” I picked up Christie, the black Barbie, and without trying to make a show of things, directed my most loving attention to her.

My friend was different suddenly in my eyes, meaner and brutish, though she meant as little harm as any of the other girls who, over the years, would relax enough to expose similar assumptions: You’re not like other black people, are you? Can I touch your hair? If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?

When I told the story to my family over dinner, no one was surprised.

“Do you wish you were white?” my mother asked, and I told her that I didn’t, by then sure that I never had, that it would be foolish to wish myself into one of those girls with so little sense she thought she knew me better than I knew myself.

There were myriad versions of such girls, and I quickly learned to dread the moment when another friend would sign up for membership in the club. “Why don’t black girls like to get their hair wet?” someone would ask, and I’d beg her with all my silent might not to take another step down that path. Over time, I’d learn to insert my own ellipses into such conversations, letting things trail off before I had the chance to be held up like a specimen for examination.

In fourth grade, a boy named Archie Murdoch interpreted a necklace I was wearing as indication that I was open for business as an object of curiosity. The necklace was a hand-me-down from Conrad’s girlfriend, a string of ivory-colored beads made of carved Bakelite. It was the first time I’d worn anything so showy and ornamental, and I felt daintily refined. I carried that feeling with me onto the school bus, where I sat involuntarily straighter, elongating my neck to showcase my newly acquired beauty.

Archie must have caught some whiff of my pride as he boarded the bus, and it quickened him. Smiling or simply baring his teeth, he reached out to yank the necklace from my throat. “Who do you think you are?” he asked, laughing as the beads scattered across the school bus floor.

My chest clamped shut, and a few tears bolted out before I had a chance to will them back. I was crushed. I didn’t even have the wherewithal to lash out with one of the insults in current circulation, and perhaps it was just as well; surely the situation would have called for something stronger. In my head, though I didn’t notice right away, he became a cruel version of one of those girls, the ones with all the questions, with the blinders they required someone’s fastidious help to remove, the ones who wittingly or not think it must be awful—quietly or glaringly or, in Archie’s case, criminally awful—being anything but what they are, anything but white.

Was that the kind of thing that happens whenever you’re black? Was it a mild, diluted version of what roamed about more brazenly in generations past? What about the other black kids at my school? Did they feel it? And if they did, why didn’t we ever talk about it? Were we afraid? Maybe it seemed shameful to admit that we lived in a world whose terms were defined by the people least like us. Was that a condition we in our silence had chosen? Was there even a choice to be made?

And what about my family? In making a choice to live where and how we did, had the seven of us split ourselves off from some key part of black reality? If not, why did it feel like a revelation every time Nella came through our door? And why should one black girl in a TV program that had been off the air for some time still stand out in my mind as distant kin, someone I longed to see again?

There was another thing complicating my sense of race. The best way I can name it is to relate a story my sister Jean used to tell sometimes about a black girl who used to bully her during seventh grade. This was back when my father was stationed at Langley Air Force Base, so let’s call the girl Virginia. I was only a baby when the story took place, but I’d heard it told so vividly in subsequent years that it had come to life for me, become one of my own stories.

“How come you talk so white?” Virginia would always ask, bumping up wantonly against shy Jean, who hurried from her locker to her classrooms and back. What’s the right answer to a question like that? If Jean had asked our father, he’d have scoffed, saying there is no such thing as “talking white,” that speaking properly has nothing to do with race or even class but rather drive, intelligence, effort. He called people like Virginia shiftless. Perhaps one or two of my white friends, upon overhearing a question like that, would have thought a moment before replying, Yeah, why do you talk like us?

“Shoot,” my father said sometimes, “those same people who fault you for speaking proper English are the first to complain, ‘Ooh, it’s because we black,’ whenever something doesn’t go their way.” There, he’d pause a moment in visible vexation, then huff aloud and spit out a word like jokers—or better yet suckers, with its lurid sibilants—in undisguised contempt. Our dad would have called Virginia sorry. He’d have said she was sorry, up to no good, squandering her potential.

But what made him so certain? He was raised in Sunflower, Alabama. Farm country. A speck on the map with its red clay roads, with its kids who’d have to take canoes to school when rain waters rose too high. His father and older brothers fought in France in World War II. Afternoons in the early 1940s, he used to spend time in his grandfather’s blacksmith shop, watching him forge tools out of molten iron. As a boy, my dad was entranced by the same books he later encouraged us to love, books by Poe, Stevenson, Sir Walter Scott. He drew and wrote poems. Once, he made county headlines for whittling a perfectly lifelike squirrel out of basswood. “Boy Carves Squirrel,” the rural paper had proclaimed. I never heard him complain about Jim Crow; it’s not that he hadn’t been affected by it, only that he refused to make it the cause of any significant development in his life. When he left home to join the military, he said it was because he was “sick of the weather down south.” Even when he and my mother were turned away from the hotel where they’d planned to spend their honeymoon (“We had a reservation, but when the clerk saw us, he said they didn’t serve Negroes”), his frustration was derailed by his delight in being with his new bride. At least that’s the story he stood by for his children.

Looking at my father, with his handsome grace and his preternatural competence, I didn’t know how to argue with him, but then I’d think of Jean narrating the story of Virginia, the trauma not yet fully gone from her voice, and I knew there was more to it than that.

Jean never did anything to Virginia, but Virginia sensed something about Jean that she couldn’t let go of. Every time she’d accuse Jean of talking white, acting white, believing she was white, all Jean could do was whisper in her own defense, “No I don’t.”

One day, Virginia shoved up against Jean in the hall and challenged her to a fight. Wanda was already across town in high school, and Conrad was still in elementary, so Jean found herself completely alone. “Okay,” she said, finally owning up to the inevitability of the situation. “Today after school.”

Once the word got out, everyone started whispering about the fight, which left Jean sick with dread. Virginia was the kind of girl who could really do damage. She kept a jar of Vaseline in her locker, and when she fought, she would smear it over her face to keep from being scratched by her opponent. But what choice did my sister have? Wouldn’t running away or telling only make things worse?

Our father was not what you’d call a race man. The vocabulary of social justice didn’t fit naturally in his mouth. Growing up when and where he did, he wasn’t blind to the subtle or glaring evidence of racial prejudice, but as far as he was concerned, the antidote was excellence, plain and simple: showing the world we were just as good, as smart, as adept, as brave, as necessary as anyone else. If the image we blacks projected got too nuanced, became threatening, began to make aggressive demands, then the message of excellence was lost, and he believed we went back to being the problem. When black athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos brought the symbolism of racial protest to the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, my father disapproved. Whenever that image of them with their black gloves and fists in the air flashed on the TV screen (I’d seen it over and over, even though it happened four years before I was born), my father would shake his head. Even if he didn’t say the word, he thought they were jokers for discrediting themselves in the world’s eyes. They’d won, hadn’t they? Wasn’t their victory statement enough? But no, they had to go and get militant, another word that sometimes fell out of his mouth like an epithet.

In the wake of the 1970s, that decade when a lot of black families had opted to give their children Swahili names, to live to the extent possible within a bubble of race pride and consciousness, we were different. We lived in suburban Northern California. My siblings and I were used to moving through a sea of white faces every day. We turned on the television and saw few examples of blacks and felt a certain relief when they were poised rather than clownish. We told ourselves that we didn’t need foreign-sounding names or African garb to know that we were black; we needed only look in the mirror. And day, after day our mother and father were working to ensure that the person each of us saw there was prepared, kempt, and confident. Beyond this, we were encouraged simply to succeed: “You have to be twice as good as they are at everything you do,” where the they in question was whites. The less frequently heard corollary to this was: “Sometimes we can be harder on one another than they are on us.”

Still, I’d seen my dad put a white man in his place for offering an uninvited “soul brother” shake. It was like watching the end of an arm-wrestling match as my father wordlessly redirected the other man’s grasp into a conventional handshake, the undeniable message being, You don’t know me like that.

But what happens when a line gets drawn between us and ourselves? I try to imagine how Jean felt that year in junior high, trapped by the need to be twice as good, opening her mouth and knowing what Virginia and her friends would say. Perhaps Jean—and anyone like her—did constitute a threat. Perhaps she seemed to stand as proof of what the world must have been telling Virginia: You must change. Perhaps Jean’s every word reached Virginia like a telegram from some inescapable future: Renounce yourself. Agree that you’re worth nothing. Learn how to talk, act, think white—or watch everything you’ve ever wanted in life get handed to someone who does. Fighting words.

On the day of their big fight, Jean tried to make her peace with the task at hand. When the dismissal bell rang at three o’clock, she stood putting her books in her locker, collecting her wits. Then, like some preposterous deus ex machina, someone ran into the hall shouting “Fight! Fight!” about a much bigger brawl that had just broken out on campus. Suddenly, the entire school, including Virginia, was running out the doors, hungry for a glimpse of the action. For Jean, this was nothing short of a miracle. It was like being preempted by breaking news in prime time: a posse of boys was duking it out in back of the school. Everyone ran to catch a glimpse before things got broken up. My sweet sister walked home unmolested. Virginia never said a thing to her again.

Over and over, our parents told us the best stand we could take was to be our best, do the best. Nothing was too hard, nothing insurmountable. But was it wrong to wonder if we might also have been turning our backs on something vital in embracing such a task? Were we announcing to the world with our can-do attitude that we were willing to bear the burden of convincing whites not to judge blacks too quickly? Were we buying into the fallacy that racial prejudice is based on logic, reason, anything other than fear and lies? Or were we proving quietly, stealthily, that race is not what others—white and black alike—were content in understanding it to be?

“Don’t you wish you were white?”

The sun came in through the eyelet curtains in my bedroom window. She didn’t know it, but she meant, Is it hard being black? Even as a child I understood that the awareness that comes from living in a white world is complicated. I didn’t know the girl terribly well, but I had an idea of what she felt, or wondered, or thought without realizing she thought it. My mind had learned to see both ways at once; hers had not yet come up against the need for such acrobatics. Did I wish I were white? No. I was quite sure I didn’t. But sometimes I was made uncomfortable by my own ability to empathize so easily with whites, to submit to their scrutiny, to go out of my way to prove I—and, by extension, we—didn’t pose a threat. It would have been nice sometimes to forget how such thinking felt.

Once I’d told my family the story, after the silence of it sinking in had passed, someone remembered a joke:

A man who has worked hard all his life never to sin, never to think bad thoughts, never to take the Lord’s name in vain, dies one night in his sleep. He wakes up in Heaven, in his own beautiful mansion right across the street from where God Himself lives.

On his first night in Heaven, the man lies awake staring at the ceiling. Slowly, he begins to make out the sounds of a distant party: music pumping, people hooting and hollering, police sirens approaching. He puts on his robe and goes across the street to God’s house to ask what is going on.

Greeting him, God explains, “Oh, that must just be all the folks down in Hell.”

“So Hell is real,” the man remarks to himself. Then, “May I see it?” he asks God.

God is not surprised by the request. Nothing surprises God. In the twinkling of an eye, He transports the man to Hell, where he sees a twelve-piece band and half-naked women and drunk men getting down on the dance floor. The man lingers there a moment before God transports him back up to Heaven.

“Lord,” he says, “I don’t understand. I served you faithfully my whole life on earth, but now, while I’m lying here bored to death in Heaven, all those sinners are having the time of their lives down in Hell. What’s going on?”

God looks at the man for a moment without speaking. (It was at this point that whoever was telling the joke would purse his lips and cock an eyebrow, embodying a version of God we’d quickly recognize as black.) “You think I’ma book a big band for just two people?”

The joke could have been about anything. What was important was our laughter—our ability to laugh, to shake free our minds from everything else that defied such ready resolution.

I don’t think we ever truly forgot about whites, even when we were alone among ourselves in the thick of family. I doubt any blacks do. There’s always a place in the mind that feels different, distinct; not worse off or envious but simply aware of an extra thing that living in a world that loathes and fears us has necessitated we develop. Perhaps that thing is the counterbalance to the history of loss I often tried to block out with silence: a riotous upswing that, quickly, painlessly, allows the mind to unravel from all the knowing and wondering it has been taught to do; a simple tickle of recognition capable of catching us up in a feeling—no matter how very fleeting—of hysterical joy.