Heads of the Colored People Read online

  I find the pose, clenching my stomach muscles to support me. I delight in my ability to lift myself up this way. I can’t see the new woman, but I feel she is watching from the safety of Child’s Pose.

  I don’t know how long I have held myself in Forearm Stand; it could be five seconds; it could be a minute. Sweat pours from my forehead onto my mat in the space between my two perched arms. I look forward to Savasana, where we will lie very still and focus our awareness on “being in this body.” My arms give out, and I try to regain my balance by “activating my core.” One leg flops to the side. I try to land in Wheel Pose, but the fall is so sudden that my body and brain disagree about their directions.

  • • •

  Last summer, when I turned thirty-three, my body started bleeding again, and the stress from that has revived the sweating problem. Nothing traumatic precipitated this change, and the absence of that trauma is somehow traumatic in its own way. I have been eating fine, well even, so many green smoothies, so many salads, very few grains. I avoid all the glutens. My husband and I had decided I should try getting off the pill, which I convinced my mother to put me on after another accident in high school, so that we could prep for trying to conceive. The pill dried up the bleeding for sixteen years, but it dried up all my other juices as well. Now I’m supposed to be “detoxing,” cleansing myself from synthetic hormones. I try to believe the bleeding is just part of the purgative process, the toxins pouring out to make me new inside, like the sweat is supposed to do in hot yoga, like a release after a large meal. If I stand up too fast, after an inversion, which I shouldn’t do anyway because it worsens my “condition,” I sometimes have a big bleed; I tell myself it’s just blackberry jam, nothing to fear. The resulting anemia has made me prone to fainting.

  I have heard that Christinia is an OB-GYN somewhere in the South, maybe here in Tennessee, an expert in hormonal imbalances. Funny that we both ended up so far from California in some shared ironic reverse migration. Funny that she fixes “feminine problems” now, when she was my problem then. Sometimes I wonder if a black woman I pass in the street is her, if I have unknowingly nodded acknowledgment to or feigned distraction to avoid eye contact with her. When I choose new doctors, I pore over the in-network lists, avoiding Chrissys, Christinias, Christinas. I wonder if I am taking the wrong approach, if somehow only she could tell me what is really wrong with me, could read my body better than a stranger.

  • • •

  When my head hits the ground, I don’t feel the pain at first, just the impact. There’s a quick bite and wetness in my mouth, the taste of my own blood, a stranger and a friend at once.

  I am struck by the clarity of all things. I see colors more brightly, briefly. I understand. Sometimes the enemy who looks like you is but a preparation for the enemy who is you. The violence directed inside mitigates the violence that comes from outside. It prepares you, creates calluses, fills holes.

  The other black woman, the new one, does not have white lint on her feet. I see them up close when she comes—with Biniam and half the class—to see if I’m okay. There are only four black feet, besides mine, in the bunch, so it’s easy to recognize hers. Her toenails are painted fuchsia. “I’m a nurse,” she says, hovering above me. “Nobody touch her.” She checks my airways, shifts my body to Recovery Pose.

  The steam and the smell in the room are nauseating. I vomit without my permission. Everyone but her backs away. “Looks like a concussion,” the black nurse says. Biniam’s feet have disappeared from my line of vision. The woman touches my forehead, my hair, and does not squirm at my sweat on her hand. Moments later, or maybe minutes, I can’t be sure, I am lifted by someone—not her, for I can still see her—onto a moving bed.

  If the class goes on without me, I will miss Savasana, my favorite part. There is the smell of my own sweat and the bile on my breath and the blood where I bit my tongue. My body has failed me again. Though I have buffeted it, it will not conform. Six months later, after my first of many surgeries, a doctor will pronounce the word “endometriosis” as the cause of all my bleeding. She will remove the patches and implants that have covered my organs; the chocolate cysts will grow back, again and again. Years later, I will wonder why I competed with that woman in the class, why Christinia competed so much with me. Years later, I will be more informed but no better.

  My head and torso are locked in position, but I can still move my fingers and toes. As they carry me to the van, I spread my limbs on the gurney and take my own Savasana. I lie very still, making imperceptible movements in my mind, scanning my body, considering its parts, its defenses, being aware. I recall that I’ve been doing this yoga since I was a child. I wish I were more evolved.

  FATIMA, THE BILOQUIST: A TRANSFORMATION STORY

  There are happier stories one could tell about Fatima. In the nineties you could be whatever you wanted—someone said that on the news—and by 1998 Fatima felt ready to become black, full black, baa baa black sheep black, black like the elbows and knees on praying folk black, if only someone would teach her.

  Up to that point she had existed like a sort of colorless gas, or a bit of moisture, leaving the residue of something familiar, sweat stains on a T-shirt, hot breath on the back of a neck, condensation rings on wood, but never a fullness of whatever matter had formed them.

  The week she met Violet, Fatima had recited “An Address to the Ladies, by their Best Friend Sincerity” before her eleventh-grade AP English class. She blended her makeup to perfection that morning, but the other students barely looked at her, instead busying themselves by clicking and replacing the lead in mechanical pencils or folding and flicking paper footballs over finger goalposts—even during the part she recited with the most emphasis: “Ah! sad, perverse, degenerate race / The monstrous head deforms the face.” They clapped dull palms for a few seconds as Fatima sulked back to her desk. But they sat up, alert, when Wally “The Wigger” Arnett recited “Incident” and said the word that always made the white kids pay attention.

  “You know, I identify with Countee Cullen and all,” Wally, with brown freckles and a floppy brown haircut, finished up. “He was a black man, and he was, like, oppressed for who he was and stuff.”

  The hands pounded a hero’s applause as Wally headed back to his seat next to Fatima looking like he expected a high five. She rolled her eyes at him, but she couldn’t articulate her wrath into something more specific. Later that morning, when Wally asked her for the fourth time that semester whether she listened to No Limit rappers, she lunged at his face. She had previously tried to explain to Wally, in so many words and dirty looks, that he was not and could not become an honorary black man through his love of Master P. He wore a vague smile that Fatima sometimes read as smug and sometimes as vapid, but he never seemed to hear her. He who would not hear, however, would feel—or would have if Mrs. Bishop hadn’t sent Fatima to the principal to “cool down” before her fingernails could scratch off any of Wally’s freckles.

  It wasn’t fair, Fatima thought, that Wally was praised, even mildly popular, for his FUBU shirts and Jordans with the tags still on them, yet Fatima was called “ghetto supastar” the one time she outlined her lips with dark pencil. Nor was it fair that she should get a warning from Principal Lee for “looking like she might become violent” when Wally said “nigger” and got applause. She was still thinking about Wally when she first encountered Violet.

  They met at the Montclair Plaza, where Fatima had been dropped off by her mother, Monica, along with the warnings that she better not (1) exceed her allowance of fifty dollars; (2) use her emergency credit card for nonemergencies; or (3) pick up any riffraff, roughnecks, or pregnancies while she was there. Number three was highly unlikely, and Fatima knew Monica knew it, but she said it anyway.

  Fatima moped near the Clinique counter with her heavy Discman tucked in a tiny backpack and her headphones wrapped around her neck, trying to decide between one shade of lipstick and another. The college student behind the counter i
gnored her, chatting with another colleague, and in situations like this, Fatima usually bought something expensive just to show the salesperson that she could. A blond girl with a short bob sauntered up next to her and said, “The burgundy is pretty, but you could do something darker.”

  Fatima peripherally saw the hair first, so she didn’t expect the rest of the package. A voluptuous—really, that was the only word that would work—girl with a wide nose and black features stood next to her. Fatima had a friend with albinism before in preschool who wore thick red glasses and had blushed almost the same color when she wet her pants at naptime once. She recognized in Violet similar features.

  “But you could get the same stuff at Claire’s for cheaper,” Violet said. “It’s not like old girl’s trying to help you anyway.”

  The salesgirl, not chastened but amused, moved back to her post and said, “May I help you,” in one of those voices that mean “Get lost.”

  “I’m still—” Fatima started.

  But the blond black girl spoke again: “We’d like some free samples of some of the lipsticks, that color”—she pointed, reaching over Fatima to a pot of dark gloss—“and that one.”

  “We only give samples,” the salesgirl said, “to—”

  “To everyone who asks, right?” Violet finished.

  The sales associate frowned, looked back at her colleague, looked at Violet and Fatima, and frowned again. “I’ll get those ready for you,” she said.

  Fatima considered putting her headphones back on and trying to float out of the department store, away from this loud girl with the jarring features and booming voice.

  “Here,” Violet said, handing her the dark gloss in its tiny gloss pot.

  “You keep it,” Fatima said and started trying to vaporize toward the shoe department.

  “It’s for you,” the girl said, following her.

  And like that, they were friends, or something to that effect.

  • • •

  It was Violet’s appraisal—“You’re, like, totally a white girl, aren’t you?”—that set Fatima into motion. They were eating dots of ice cream that same day at the food court after Violet showed Fatima how to get samples from Estée Lauder, Elizabeth Arden, and MAC. Fatima felt a little like a gangster, holding up the reluctant salesgirls for their stash, but she had a nearly full bag of swag by then, perfume, lip gloss, and oil-blotting papers, without spending any of her allowance. It was already too good to be true, so she didn’t feel sad when Violet said “white girl,” but almost relieved by the inevitable.

  Fatima had been accused of whiteness and being a traitor to the race before, whenever she spoke up in Sunday school at her AME church or visited her family in Southeast San Diego (Southeast a universal geographical marker for the ghetto) or when a cute guy who was just about to ask her out backed away, saying, “You go to private school, don’t you?” It was why she didn’t have any black friends—and why, she worried, she would never have a boyfriend, even riffraff to upset her mother.

  The allegations offended her but never moved her to any action other than private crying or retreating further into her melancholy belief that her school, Westwood Prep, and her parents’ high-paying jobs, had made her somehow unfit for black people. Rather than respond, she usually turned up her Discman louder, sinking into the distantly black but presently white sounds of ska and punk, and sang under her breath, “I’m a freak / I’m a freak” (in the style of Silverchair, not Rick James). At the moment she especially enjoyed reading Charles Brockden Brown and daydreaming of a sickly boyfriend like Arthur Mervyn. If black people wouldn’t accept her, she would stick to what she knew.

  But Violet’s judgment held more heft, in her critique a possibility for transformation. When a black girl with natural green eyes and blond hair and a big chest and bubble butt tells you that you, with your sable skin and dark hair, are not black enough, you listen.

  “It’s not that I’m trying to be white. It’s just that’s what I’m around.”

  “You don’t have no church friends? You adopted? Your parents white, too?” Violet didn’t seem to want a response. “Where do you stay?”

  “With my parents.” Fatima wondered if something was wrong with Violet for asking such a stupid question.

  “I mean where do you live?” Violet asked.

  “Upland.”

  “They got black people there. My cousin Frankie lives there,” Violet said, chewing the dots of ice cream in a way that set Fatima’s teeth on edge. She wore a tight white top, cream Dickies, and white Adidas tennis shoes.

  “Yes, but not on my street.” Fatima wore a pink cardigan, black Dickies, and skater shoes, Kastels.

  Violet paused her crunching and talking for a moment. “You have a boyfriend?”

  Fatima shook her head. “Do you?”

  “I’m in between options right now. Anyway, the last one is locked up in Tehachapi.”

  Fatima nodded. She had a cousin who had served time there. He called her bourgie, and she’d kicked him in the face once, delighting in his fat lip and his inability to hit girls.

  “I’m kidding,” Violet said. “We don’t all get locked up.”

  Fatima stuttered.

  “I can see I’ma have to teach you a lot of things. You ready?” Violet meant ready to leave the food court, but Fatima meant more when she said, “Yeah, I’m ready.” And thus began her transformation.

  • • •

  If only Baratunde Thurston had been writing when Fatima came of age, she could have learned how to be black from a book instead of from Violet’s charm school. Even a quick glance at Ralph Ellison could have saved her a lot of trouble, but she wasn’t ready for that, caught up, as she was, in the dramas of Arthur Mervyn and Carwin, the Biloquist, and all of them. With Violet’s help, Fatima absorbed the sociocultural knowledge she’d missed—not through osmosis or through more relevant literature, but through committed, structured ethnographical study.

  She immersed herself in slang as rigorously as she would later immerse herself in Spanish for her foreign-language exam in grad school; she pored over Vibe magazine and watched Yo! MTV Raps and The Parkers, trying to work her mouth around phrases with the same intonation that Countess Vaughn used, a sort of combination of a Jersey accent and a speech impediment. When she couldn’t get into those texts, she encouraged herself with the old episodes of Fresh Prince of Bel-Air that played in constant early-morning and late-night rotation, feeling assured that if Ashley Banks could, after five seasons, become almost as cool as Will, then she could, too. Her new turns of phrase fit her about as awkwardly as the puffy powder-blue FUBU jacket she found in a thrift store in downtown Rialto.

  Still, she was happy when Violet looked approvingly at it. Pale Violet became the arbiter of Fatima’s blackness, the purveyor of all things authentic. Though she was five feet eight and chunky by most standards—nearly obese by Fatima’s—you would think Violet, judging by the way she walked, was Pamela Anderson, like a hula doll on a dashboard swinging hips and breasts.

  The distance between their respective houses was fifteen minutes, but only seven if they met halfway, Fatima borrowing her father’s extra car (the 1993 Beamer, so as not to look ostentatious) and Violet getting a ride from one of her brothers or occasionally driving her mother’s old Taurus. They never met at each other’s houses, lest Fatima’s upper-middle opulence embarrass Violet, and because there was no space for Violet to carve out for herself at her house.

  Violet made Fatima a study guide of the top ten black expressions for rating attractive men, and they practiced the pronunciations together. The pinnacle of hotness, according to Violet, was either “dangfoine,” “hella foine, or “bout it, bout it,” as in “Oooh, he bout it, bout it.” This phrase especially required the Countess Vaughn intonation and often included spontaneous bouts of raising the roof.

  During their tutoring sessions, Fatima stifled her joke about the rain in Spain falling mostly on the plains and practiced on, assured that Violet�
��s instruction would confer upon her, like Carwin, “a wonderful gift” of biloquism.

  Glossaries soon followed, in which Violet broke down slang that had previously mystified Fatima. She couldn’t wait to replace her traditional “fer shure” with “fisshow” in a real conversation, but she took issue with some of Violet’s recommendations, especially “nigga” and “gangsta,” which Violet explained as terms of endearment. “So basically,” Fatima summarized, ventriloquizing Ashley Banks again, “you want me to turn good things into bad things and vice versa.”

  Violet said, “Mostly.”

  Fatima tried pumping her shoulders in a brief Bankhead Bounce, but it was obvious she lacked the follow-through and wasn’t ready for dancing yet.

  And it was almost like any romantic comedy in which the sassy black person moves in with the white people and teaches them how to live their lives in color and put some bass in their voices, only Steve Martin wasn’t in it, and no one was a maid or a butler or nanny, and the romance was between two girls, and it was platonic, and they were both black this time, but one didn’t look like it, and one didn’t sound like it, at least not consistently.

  • • •

  “They racist up at that school? I can’t stand cocky white people,” Violet said one day while they sat at their usual table, near the flower divider in the mall’s arboretum. Some white guys from Hillwood sat across the way, laughing loudly.

  Fatima didn’t like to talk about her school, but everyone in the Inland Empire knew Westwood and Hillwood, rivals on and off the football field. “I don’t think so,” Fatima said.

  “What do you mean you don’t think so? Either something’s racist or it’s not.”

  No one at school poked out his tongue and called her that, like they did in the poem Wally read, but Fatima thought about Wally, his affectations, and Principal Lee.

  “It’s not always comfortable,” she said. “It can be awkward, but I’m awkward.”

  “You sure are.” Violet laughed, and Fatima laughed, too. She was learning to do more of that, and to wear a kind of self-assuredness with her side-swooped Aaliyah bangs.