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From SeeingBlack.com Literature Secret Daughter: A Mixed-Race Daughter and the Mother Who Gave Her Away (Viking)
Pages 55-56 After the wedding, Mommie and Aunt Peggy Spent long hours on the phone, commiserating about their sudden poverty--Larry had the been giving all his money to his mother for safekeeping, and she had seized everything. Aunt Peggy reassured Mommie that at least Larry still had his talent and they could start over. Off the phone, she told me that Larry’s mother was being vindictive toward Mom. I was too ashamed to tell her it was all my fault. Soon after they married, I visited Mom and Larry in New York. I cherished the nightly bubble bath I still shared with my mother during these visits. I would sit at the faucet end because I was small, while she lounged in her wide end of the tub. We poured bubbles over our heads. We played peekaboo with the washcloths. We lathered up with Johnson’s Baby Soap and made animals out of the bubbles. One night we were sharing the trivia of our day when Mom looked at me in a serious way and declared, “You know, if you hadn’t gotten darker as you grew older, you could have stayed with me. You wouldn’t have to live with Peggy.” I looked down at my arm, the brown skin against the white porcelain, the white suds. “What?” I asked. In the back of my brain, I remembered that word, that word I’d had such difficulty comprehending. Colored. “You were light. Light as I am when you were born. If you had stayed that color, I would never have sent you to live with Peggy. You could have stayed with me.” I kept staring down at my arm. People born with a natural tan, Paul had said at the Miss America pageant. I struggled against the comprehension. The color of the crayons at the end of the box. Really kinky, curly hair. Reaching up, I touched the tight curls of my hair. Negro. The white bubbles dripped from my hand into my eyes. I looked at Mommie watching me. Thirty years later, when I reminded her of that night, my mother found it hard to believe she could have said such a thing to a child. At the time, so did Aunt Peggy and Uncle Paul. I told Aunt Peggy first, in a matter-of fact style, giving the information no more meaning than the state of the weather. Her eyelids fluttered as she looked at me, and her mouth dropped open. “Oh,” she said. Her face looked like an ice sculpture ready to crack into a million pieces. Thinking no more of it, I went upstairs and did some homework. After Uncle Paul got home, I heard murmuring between them. I crept from my bed to the top of the stairs, where the space between the stairwell and the pantry allowed me to eavesdrop. Uncle Paul was angry. “What kind of a thing is that to say to a little girl?” he demanded in his gruff voice. As I tiptoed from my eavesdropping spot, the floorboards cracked and their voices lowered. I jumped into bed and pulled the sheets over my head. I had done a bad thing, first by forgetting the rules of the game, and now by telling Aunt Peggy and Uncle Paul that Mommie had noticed I had grown darker. Pages 247-249 So many times, as a plane descended into the Los Angeles night, I had watched the white lights of that city dancing below the clouds, the freeways blazing a trail of red taillights that led to a month’s vacation with Mom and Larry. But in 1989, I came to L.A. as a producer for CBS News. I was coming to produce a segment on the singer Natalie Cole for West 57th. I had pushed to do this profile, against resistance form my executives, because I felt an affinity with Natalie, the youngest daughter of Nat King Cole. As a child she had been shuttled between the black middle-class section of L.A., Baldwin Hills, and a boarding school in New England. When I first learned about Baldwin Hills, shortly after the Watts riots in 1965, it was because I had discovered in Ebony magazine that Nat King Cole’s family lived there. I wanted to meet some black kids, kids like me, in L.A. I had asked my Mom where Baldwin Hills was. She didn’t know. “Somewhere over near Watts,” she said vaguely, aligning it with those ominous smoke signals from 1965. I told her that I’d read that middle-class black folks lived there. I wanted to see them, take a drive through. Finally one afternoon I slipped behind the wheel of the Mercedes coupe while Mom and Larry napped, got a map, and found my way. Baldwin Hills could have been Venice Park in Atlantic City or Hyde Park in Chicago or any Atlanta suburb; it could as easily have been sections of Beverly Hills or Sag Harbor. I found the street where Cole’s widow lived. Nearby, kids my age played. I wanted to meet them, but I didn’t know how. I didn’t know how to explain who I was. I didn’t know how to say I was there because I wanted to meet some black teenagers, teenagers who might be like me, while I was out in L.A visiting my white parents, so instead I sat parked at the curb, watching them play basketball. After a while, I turned my mother’s wine-colored Mercedes-Benz convertible around and found my way back to Nichols Canyon. Fifteen years later, I could introduce myself as a producer on assignment for CBS News. I was coming to stay with my mother while I shot a story inspired by my adolescent yearning to belong. A month earlier, in panic, my mother had called me, the tone in her voice the same as Aunty Peggy’s the night she was mugged. She had arrived home to find the property defaced, garbage bags floating in the pool. This, she said, combined with two earlier break-ins, had made her paranoid enough to buy a gun - a .45 Magnum, which she hadn’t learned how to use because, she said, she was afraid to shoot it. There had even been an item in the Hollywood Reporter about her going out to the range for target practice. Pulling up to the newly installed security gate, I hesitated. Surely Mom and Larry were asleep. I pushed the bell, tentatively. No one answered. Either the bell wasn’t working or, more likely, I felt reluctant to ring it repeatedly at 4:00 A.M. I sat in the car a while, watching the digital clock push 4:30, listening to the beats on the radio, watching the light below and the sky above, searching for telltale signs of dawn. I thought to get out of the car and climb over the gate and into the house. I knew a secret way in, thorough the cat door, but I feared triggering some newly installed alarm. I had a short Afro. I wore jeans and a sweatshirt; to my mother, foggy with sleep, I might look like any other black person I could imagine her tiptoeing out of her bedroom, asking “Who’s there?” and pulling the trigger before I had to a chance to answer. I could imagine the headlines: MOTHER SHOOTS DAUGHTER MISTAKEN FOR INTRUDER. So I stayed in my rental car, sleeping fitfully, waiting for the gray dawn to reveal my features and bring me to the safety of my mother’s arms. Larry found me there in the morning as he walked up the driveway to get the paper. “What are you doing here, J.B?” he asked. I told him the bell hadn’t rung, and we walked down to greet my mother. “I was awake all night waiting for you,” she said. “Why didn’t’ you climb the fence?” “I didn’t want to get shot.” “Shot?” she repeated. “Well I know you’ve got that .45 in here,” I said, as flippantly as I could. She paused for three or four beats. “There is no gun,’ she said, an edge in her voice. “I just said that so the word would be out in case somebody who knows us is defacing the property.” We looked at each other. The unspoken hung between us in the air like a high voltage wire, the current running form her eyes to mine. I had always measured the distance between us in miles, hours, days. Now we stood in the same room, looking across a chasm even our love for one another could not bridge. © Copyright by SeeingBlack.com |
