Mixed Read online

  I crayoned accessories onto my self-portrait and decided to ask my mother if half-white kids could get head lice. If Sister Mary was wrong, this would be the second time my mother had corrected her. The first time, she’d corrected her covertly, acknowledging to me that I was right but refusing my plea to write a note telling Sister Mary so.

  “Angela, I am not writing a note about chitlins to Sister Mary,” my mother said. “But you were right; she probably never ate them.”

  I knew I was right. Sister Mary had sworn I was wrong, though. She embarrassed me in front of the entire class.

  The chitlin incident happened during American history while we were going over the three pages in our book dedicated to slavery. We always read history lessons out loud, going up and down the aisles, with every student getting a paragraph. I always skipped ahead to see what paragraph we’d be on by the time we got to my desk.

  To me, the only thing better than getting a nice long paragraph to read was having a surprise spelling bee. I might have been the youngest and got my ass beat regularly in kickball games, but I could outspell and outread everyone. My slavery paragraph was fat, full of commas and periods. I couldn’t wait to dazzle the room with my perfect enunciation.

  When my turn came, I dove into the words, reading them with the zest and energy of a weathercaster. “The slaves made meals from the leftovers of their masters!” I said, making sure the tone of my voice reflected how horrific that was. “Some of the food slaves ate included pig’s feet, chitlins, and—”

  “Angela Nissel, please repeat that last word again,” Sister Mary interrupted from the front of the classroom.

  I looked down at the page, my eyes desperately scanning the word, trying to figure out if I’d skipped a letter or missed a vowel sound. Nope. I knew chitterlings was pronounced chitlins the same as plough looked like rough but was pronounced an entirely different way. My grandmother made chitlins once a month, and even though the bucket they came in sometimes said chitterlings everyone in the family said chitlins.

  “Chitlins,” I repeated loudly, thinking Sister Mary had misheard me.

  Sister Mary laughed her quick laugh, then tightened her little lips into a frown and covered it with her palm. “It’s chit-ter-lings, Angela. Break it into syllables.”

  I glanced up from my book and saw the whole class turned in their chairs, staring at me. I gripped my history book so tightly, the brown paper bag book cover had sweaty little fingerprints on it. I knew she didn’t really expect me to sound out the word like a little kid, did she?

  “Chit!” Sister Mary yelled, then looked at me expectantly.

  “Chit,” I repeated softly, eyes down, focusing on the smiling slaves in my book, wondering if they were happy because their masters didn’t allow them to read, so they didn’t have to go through humiliation like this.

  “Ter!” Sister barked.

  “Ter,” I replied, a little louder.

  Every white eye in the classroom looked at me, ready to giggle if I took another pronunciation misstep. I was getting the same looks Joey Shalaci got when he took twenty minutes to stutter through a sentence. The black kids’ faces looked more serious; their eyes pleaded with me to hurry it along. Slavery was embarrassing. According to our American history book, it was black people’s only contribution to this country. Here I was stretching it into syllables.

  “Lings!” Sister Mary shouted, like she was giving a dog a command.

  I sang the end back to her and exhaled, glad to be done with the torture.

  “Now, put it all together,” Sister Mary said.

  “Chit-ter-lings,” I said, my face about as pink as the pig’s on the page. My mouth felt funny pronouncing chitlins like that. I knew Sister Mary was wrong. Unless she ate chitlins, how was she going to tell me how to pronounce them?

  Before I could start to read the rest of my “what slaves ate” paragraph, Sister Mary interrupted again. “Does anyone know what chit-ter-lings are?”

  Silence. Sister Mary looked around the room and frowned, like she suspected some people in the room were withholding information.

  “Chit-ter-lings are pig intestines,” Sister Mary explained. The entire classroom groaned, and some of the boys made dry heaving sounds. Sister Mary ignored the outburst and moved her gaze to the three brownest faces in the room. “Eddie, Jackie, Greg, do any of you eat chit-ter-lings?” Sister asked with a raised eyebrow.

  Jackie shook her head no, so fearfully you’d have thought Sister was offering her a chance to be an actual slave. Greg, who was usually quiet, yelled, “Yuck! No!” Eddie didn’t say anything; he simply dropped his head down on his desk as if he were dead.

  “Eddie George, does your family eat chit-ter-lings?” Sister prodded.

  If anyone in the class ate pig intestines, it had to be Eddie. He was known as the troublemaker. I don’t know what he did to piss Sister Mary off so much, but she seemed to enjoy singling him out. I always wondered if her treatment of him scarred him for life, until I saw on the news that he went on to win the Heisman trophy and play for the Tennessee Titans. I saw him in a restaurant once and wanted to go over and ask if he remembered Chitlins Day, but I was afraid he’d think I was a football groupie with a really bad pro-black come-on line.

  “I don’t eat chit-ter-lings,” Eddie replied, making his pronunciation perfect to avoid Sister’s wrath.

  Seemingly satisfied with his answer, Sister Mary looked at me. “Angela, do you or your mother eat chit-ter-lings?”

  “No!” I lied. I was too young to understand the word sellout or know that if I got older and denied eating soul food to be accepted by white people, some people would revoke my black pass for life. In that moment, there was no way I was going to be the new six-year-old Methodist girl who ate pig guts. Sister Mary’s husband would have to forgive me.

  Sister Mary accepted my answer. I went on to read the rest of the paragraph perfectly, and the Third Grade Chitlin Inquisition was over.

  The head-lice check was the second time I was grouped with Eddie, Jackie, and Greg but, unlike eating chitlins, not having head lice could be seen as a positive. I thought, Maybe all this race stuff evens out. For every embarrassing chitterlings experience, the kids with one or two black parents got a reprieve from something else embarrassing, like lice checks.

  Still, as boring as going on a group excursion to the school nurse was, I felt awkward being one of only four students left behind. I wanted to be with the majority for once in this new school. It was bad enough that almost everyone else in my class was preparing for First Communion, a class I had to sit out of. I wanted to know so badly what communion tasted like. Was it a cookie or was it more like a wafer? I hoped it was a cookie, since my mother rarely let me eat high-sugar foods.

  I drew one more pair of earrings on my self-portrait and started drawing in the background of my two-dimensional head. I drew my ideal bedroom, complete with two Menudo posters, even though I’d never listened to any of their songs. The popular girls at St. Ireneaus loved Menudo, so I figured maybe when they came back from the lice checks, they’d see my Menudo posters and let me walk home with them.

  One by one my classmates started returning. As soon as a student showed Sister Mary his clean bill of head health, she had him start on his self-portrait. The returning and drawing flow was interrupted only when Joey Shalaci came back with his head down, holding up a bright pink note for Sister Mary. Sister Mary backed away from him and pulled a trash bag from the broom closet. She passed it down the aisle until it reached Joey, who stuffed all his belongings into it and exited. Everyone stopped drawing, and whispers buzzed around the room about Joey’s failed head inspection.

  “I guess since everyone is so talkative, everyone is done with their self-portraits,” Sister Mary said, without looking up from her desk.

  Always the A student, I raised my hand so I wouldn’t be grouped with the talkers. “I’m done, Sister,” I called out.

  Sister Mary looked up at me in disbelief, like I
was inconveniencing her by finishing so quickly. She propped both of her chubby hands up on her desk to help lift her sturdy frame from her chair, grabbed her beat-up cigar box of crayons, and slowly walked down my row.

  She loomed silently over my desk for a second. I tensed up, wondering what mistake I had made this time. Would she make fun of my Menudo posters? Should I have drawn a crucifix instead?

  “Angela, you should color in your face,” Sister Mary said, rummaging through her cigar box, looking at various tan-hued crayons, and then squinting as she pressed them against my cheek.

  First Joey had head cooties and now I had to color in my face? Way too much commotion in the classroom for one day. Giggles erupted from every desk. Well, almost every desk. The black kids stayed silent, of course. If she wanted light old me to color in my face, she might just suggest that we all just take turns using our Ash Wednesday leftovers to color in their faces.

  Finally, Sister Mary found a crayon she thought best suited my complexion. “Here, Burnt Umber looks to be about right. Color your face in, and then you’ll be done.” Sister Mary held out a crayon that looked like it had never been used. Hot Magenta was worn down to a nub the size of a peanut, but in all the years this box existed, no one had even colored a shirt Burnt Umber.

  I took the crayon, wishing it were a magic wand that could turn me into an ostrich so I could stick my whole head into sand until the school day was over. I’d remove my head only when I got home to ask my mother why I wasn’t gray like an ostrich, because don’t black and white combine to make gray? They certainly do not make burnt umber.

  I decided I would rebel against face painting and started to color my hair with burnt umber. If Sister Mary asked, I’d tell her I couldn’t get to my face; I had way too much hair. As I was coloring in the top of my left braid, Sister Mary called out to Jackie, Greg, and Eddie, “You three can come up to get crayons to make your faces darker too, if you want.”

  Of course they didn’t want to. Didn’t Sister Mary get it? We just wanted to fit in.

  Tommy “Blimp” McCallum sat next to me, so I looked at his picture. Despite his nickname, he’d drawn himself thin as a rail. I wondered why Sister didn’t suggest that Tommy draw himself with a double chin. Would it be wrong for me to raise my hand and suggest that? Tommy—like me, Jackie, Eddie, and Greg—drew himself as he wished he looked—as close to the majority and the popular kids as possible.

  When we finished our drawings and broke for recess, I ran over to Karen and Kelly. They were the unpopular white girls (they didn’t have perms) and the only friends I’d made so far. They knew how embarrassed I was. They knew what it felt like to have Sister Mary make a spectacle of you, so they did what all compassionate friends do, teased me about it in hopes I’d start laughing.

  “Angela, color yourself in!” Karen said, mocking Sister Mary’s voice.

  I rolled my eyes and looked down. I wasn’t ready to laugh yet. Sister Mary was wrong about chitlins and she was wrong about my complexion.

  “She’s so mean,” I said, hoping to steer the conversation to something else mean Sister did.

  “Did you color yourself in?” Karen asked.

  “No!” I exclaimed, as if even the thought of coloring my face in disgusted me.

  “Well, you’re almost the same color as us,” Kelly said, and held her arm out next to mine. Karen held her arm out, too. My arm was darker, but not by much.

  I flipped my hand so my palm faced the sky.

  “On this side of our hands we’re the same color,” I said.

  “Maybe this is your white side!” Karen exclaimed, pressing her palm against mine. I smiled politely at my new friend’s observation, even though I knew that wasn’t how the whole mixing-races thing worked. I was happy for the moment just to be accepted.

  Mulatto Pride Turbo Boost

  “You’re half-white, which makes you half all right!”

  —George Jefferson

  When it came to getting new electronics, my father was the consumerism king of the block. Every Saturday morning, he would brag to our next door neighbor about his latest acquisition while they were washing their cars. “Yeah, I just picked up this remote control that—hold on to your hat—isn’t attached by a long cord to the TV.” The next thing you know, people were pouring out of their row houses to test out our new devices. For a week after we got a refrigerator that dispensed ice and water straight from the door, people came by with big Slurpee cups, filling up and praising our appliance.

  “This sure is something. How much a thing like this run?” our neighbor Mr. Glen asked, not paying attention as the water overflowed from his cup onto the floor.

  “It’s magic! A magic ice machine!” a woman we barely knew exclaimed, pressing for more ice and then giggling as it hit the bottom of her cup.

  My father’s latest purchase was a VCR that loaded from the top and churned as loudly as a food processor while rewinding. This VCR cemented our status as the most technologically advanced family on the block, and it provided me with a new way to overdose on my favorite activity—watching television.

  When my parents started giving me an allowance for doing my chores, I negotiated for a 25 percent pay cut in order to extend my bedtime so I could watch Knight Rider and Gimme a Break. On school days, my mother would have to blast “Sexual Healing” by Marvin Gaye on my Fisher-Price record player to wake me up, but Saturday morning I’d be in front of the television at 7:30 A.M. sharp to catch up with my cartoons. My week would be ruined if I missed Smurfs. I didn’t just watch them, I studied them. I could have written my third-grade dissertation on the closed market economy of the Smurf Village. I would pretend I was Smurfette and would frustrate my parents by refusing to improve my adjective vocabulary; to me, everything was “smurfy.”

  The smurfiest event of my childhood became my weekly trips to the video store with my father. Sometimes, if I’d gotten spanked during the week, my guilt-ridden father would salve my sore behind with an extra video store trip. In the middle of a whupping that barely hurt, I’d think, If I cry really loud like I’m dying, I’ll get to rent a Woody Woodpecker tape.

  Video Tape Library was a small store in our local strip mall. My father would let my brother and me pick out a cartoon tape while he looked at the new arrivals. I had just picked out my Heckle and Jeckle tape when Dad called out that it was time to go. I grabbed J.R.’s hand and followed him to the counter, where we stood by my father and waited for him to pay. The cashier suddenly stopped ringing up the videos and glanced down quizzically at my brother and me, then up to my father. “Do you know whose kids these are?” the cashier asked.

  “Never seen them in my life,” my father said, his eyes scanning our bodies, like if he concentrated hard enough he might figure out how these two kids got by his side.

  Maybe Dad’s gone crazy or has amnesia, I thought. Did he hit himself in the head recently? On the very cartoon tapes we rented from this place, I’d seen how, when characters fell off ladders, stars would orbit around their heads and they couldn’t remember their own names. I tried to think whether my father had fallen recently or if I’d seen stars around his head. My brother probably didn’t think anything. He was only two and the only word he had mastered was “bye-bye.”

  The cashier leaned over the counter so he could be at my eye level.

  “Where are your parents?” he asked.

  Hello, I’m a kid; probably the guy I’m standing next to and the guy my brother looks like a tan version of—that would be a parent. Of course, I didn’t say that; I couldn’t figure out what to do. My mind was overloaded by my father’s denial of me. If your father denies you, should you deny him, too? The cashier is a stranger so I’m not allowed to speak to him without a trusted adult around but since my father has denied ever seeing me, technically he’s no longer a trusted adult. I looked up at my father and tried to send him a telepathic message: Come back, Dad. Think really hard. You do remember me. He met my gaze with a blank look, so I stayed s
ilent and stared at the cashier.

  By this time, the cashier had to have been thinking, Great, I’ve not only got two lost black kids, they’re also deaf-mutes. He tried a new tactic: rewording the question and speaking in the exaggeratedly loud, slow voice normally reserved for people who don’t understand English.

  “Who did you come to the vid-ee-o store with?” he yelled, his frustration mounting.

  My father looked down at me like he was expecting an answer as well. I refused to speak to either of them.

  With an expression that in my advanced age I now recognize as the I don’t get paid enough for this shit look, the cashier stood back up and addressed the entire shopping audience.

  “Whose kids are these?” he yelled. Everyone in the small video store glanced pitifully at the two lost black kids, shrugged their shoulders, and went back to perusing the tape selections.

  I swear, incidents like this from my childhood are why I hate being stared at to this day. I’m so self-conscious, I leave home only when the line of cars on my street starts moving through the green light. If I leave on the red, people have nothing to entertain themselves with until the light changes, so they stare at me. I hate it. It makes me late for work.

  With all corners of the store eyeballing me, I thought the next step would be some strange family snatching me up, claiming I belonged to them. The terror of losing my mother and my poodle kicked in. I yelled “Dad!” and yanked his T-shirt.

  My father laughed. “These are my kids, man.” The cashier looked at him for a moment, to ascertain if he was joking, and then lowered his head.

  “I’m sorry. I thought, because they were . . .” The cashier’s voice trailed off and he started ringing up our tapes. He gave the bar codes the same rapt attention I’ve seen anthropology professors give to rare caveman skulls, and handed our rentals over to us without a further word.