What We Lose

To my cousins and me, American blacks were the epitome of American cool. Blacks were the stars of rap videos, big-name comedians, and actors with their own television shows and world tours. Notorious B.I.G., Puff Daddy, Janet Jackson. Martin Lawrence, Michael Jordan, Halle Berry, Denzel Washington. We worshipped them, and my cousins, especially, looked to the freedom that these stars represented as aspirational. It was a freedom synonymous with democracy, with political freedom—with America itself. It was rarefied, powerful.

But when I called myself black, my cousins looked at me askance. They are what is called coloured in South Africa—mixed race—and my father is light-skinned black. I looked just like my relatives, but calling myself black was wrong to them. Though American blacks were cool, South African blacks were ordinary, yet dangerous. It was something they didn’t want to be.

American blacks were my precarious homeland—because of my light skin and foreign roots, I was never fully accepted by any race. Plus my family had money, and all the black kids in my town came from the poorer areas. I was friends with the kids who lived on my block and were in my honors classes—white kids. I was a strange in-betweener.

Yet my parents always spoke of a strong solidarity with black people in Africa. To call themselves something other than black was to take on the divisions of apartheid that grouped them according to skin tone and afforded them unequal privileges to keep them beholden to the state. They had been unfairly segregated, and it was their wish to live outside these divisions. That was something I absorbed, that never left me as the years went by. But when I expressed this desire outside the house, I was met with confusion and, at the worst, hostility.

At a party during my senior year of high school, when my friends and I were just beginning to drink beer and learn how to be ourselves in the company of these new factors—drunkenness, adulthood—I mentioned, as I often did (I fashioned myself as a politically engaged contrarian in my high school years), that I was the only black person at the party.

“But you’re not, like, a real black person,” a white girl named Anabel said to me, smiling, solicitation in her eyes. I felt ashamed, stunned. Uncomfortable, I said nothing, and after that day I never spoke to her again, indignant, but still unsure how to respond.

That the tragic aspects of American blacks’ legacy are largely visible to the rest of the world is something I realized only later. I can quote our poverty rates, our mortality rates, black-on-black crime, and narrate the story of America’s prison system, which churns black men in and out like assembly-line products.

My naïveté, my feeling of rejection, made my identification all the more strong. I only desired to belong, and I idealized this group as one does a storybook character or a superstar, or anything one doesn’t know firsthand yet loves like an old friend.

Fuck the world, fuck my moms and my girl

My life is played out like a jheri curl, I’m ready to die

My mother cautioned that I would never have true relationships with darker-skinned women. These women would always be jealous of me, and their jealousy would always undermine our friendship. She told me to be careful if I ever went into the city, that the rough teenage ones would slash my face with a razor blade. When I fought with a friend, my mother would inquire about her complexion. If the friend was darker, she would nod her head, a look of “I told you so” on her brow.

I asked her how she could have such racist views of women. Weren’t we all sisters?

“That’s just how it is,” she told me blankly.

My mother was a shade darker than me, with almond-shaped eyes and hair that was slightly coarse but straightened out easily with an iron. She was identifiably black, more than I am (I am often mistaken for Hispanic or Asian, sometimes Jewish), but categorically light-skinned. Sometimes people thought she was Spanish too, and dark enough that we often encountered the uncomfortable pause of a white woman in my hometown trying to discern our relationship: mother/daughter or hired help/charge.

My mother’s views imbued my friendships with political importance—if I could maintain a relationship with a darker-skinned woman, I would prove her wrong. And so I pursued these relationships with fervor.

I’ve often thought that being a light-skinned black woman is like being a well-dressed person who is also homeless. You may be able to pass in mainstream society, appearing acceptable to others, even desired. But in reality you have nowhere to rest, nowhere to feel safe. Even while you’re out in public, feeling fine and free, inside you cannot shake the feeling of rootlessness. Others may even envy you, but this masks the fact that at night, there is nowhere safe for you, no place to call your own.

I see you looking at me. I know how you see me.

Aminah had been my best friend since elementary school. Her father was the administrator of continuing studies at the same college where my father taught. Together they were two of only five black faculty, causing them to form an immediate bond out of a shared, slightly traumatizing experience. Aminah and I went to swimming lessons and summer camp together as children; as teenagers we drifted in and out of each other’s orbit at school, but our bond outside of that restrictive environment remained familial. Even if, on the surface, we seemed as dissimilar as possible, a calm, unshakable current of love always ran just underneath.

Aminah was a preternatural beauty. With long, jet black hair that sat in perfectly tame spiral curls, a slight frame, and clear mahogany skin, she fit in easily among the prettiest girls in school. She was mild mannered, though, quietly studious, and kind. She kept her stubborn streak expertly disguised. I always had a hard time maintaining any semblance of togetherness, from my hair to my clothes to my opinions that always seemed to make themselves known in the worst company at the worst possible moments. I had the feeling that I embarrassed Aminah, so I saved her the trial of having to reject me socially by leaving her alone at school.

It felt like a foregone conclusion when one of the boys in our class fell in love with Aminah—one of the handsome boys from a good family who owned a lake house in one of the fancier vacation towns upstate. His name was Frank.

At first, there were rumors of tension because Aminah was black and Frank was not just white but a WASP, and his family had the type of standing that a black girlfriend could tarnish. At first, Aminah told me, Frank’s family didn’t invite her to the house, even though they had tea with his older brother Paul’s girlfriend every Sunday afternoon.

The story that wasn’t told was that Aminah’s family members were just as wary of the union as Frank’s, because even though they were now bourgeois, Aminah’s father had been an activist and agitator back in the day, just like my parents, and they always hoped—assumed—that her looks and education meant she would have her pick of suitors, and that pick would be black, just like her.

Over time, these tensions soothed into the background, and Aminah and Frank became one of the envied couples at our high school, leaving room for all the other relationship tensions to resume their rightful place in the foreground.

I started listening to hard rock music with emotional lyrics, like my friends. We didn’t have cable, so I spent hours at their houses after school, watching music videos on MTV and clearing their pantries of sugary snacks. My parents would never buy snacks, because they were too practical and too busy for anything more than three meals per day. “Snack” was a word that never entered their vocabulary. On weekends, I would take the commuter train into the city, sit in coffee shops, and smoke cigarettes while reading old paperbacks. I told my parents I was going to the central library branch downtown to study, which was partly true. I was studying for my grown-up life, the one I would have when I finally left their house.

Most of my friends were school nerds, but some of them also had piercings and tattoos. My friend Fiona had green hair. My mother liked her the least of my other friends, whom she called freaks. I told my mother, with practiced cool, not to be so dramatic. The few times I tried this, it made her boil over.

I never got up the courage to color my hair, but I often let it go curly and wild, refusing to straighten or restrain it from the natural way it fell on my head. I had the nerve to like my hair just the way it was. My mother called me untidy. “I don’t know why you do this to yourself,” she said, huffing and rolling her eyes. What she meant was, why do you do this to me? My self-expression obviously caused her pain. From the time I was five until high school, she dragged me to the hairdresser every two months to have my hair chemically straightened. She insisted, explicitly and implicitly, that straight hair was beautiful, and the kind she and I were born with—kinky, curly, that grew up and out instead of down—was ugly.

“That’s what a pretty girl looks like,” she told me when I came home from the hairdresser, my hair shining, my scalp in ravages. Only the thought that my mother would find me beautiful—the anticipation of her approval and the peace it would bring—would comfort me through the pain the next time I sat in the hairdresser’s chair, to have it done to me all over again.

My high school boyfriend took me to prom in his beat-up hatchback Toyota. He was decidedly unspectacular—a C student who went on to a local university and dropped out after two years. He never left his small storefront apartment in our hometown. But he was handsome, with a strong, square jaw, sinewy arms, and smooth brown skin. He was polite, but with a bit of edge and tastes that ran toward the alternative, the slightly dark. We met in art class.

When I finished dressing, he was downstairs in the living room, talking to my father. They were like a teen movie come to life, my father with his chest out, protectiveness personified, and Jerome shrinking in his tuxedo, visibly nervous. “You look beautiful,” Jerome said, sighing, when I came downstairs. In my head, I wondered at how my movie scene felt complete.

We never had sex, because I was too afraid and I wasn’t in love with him. I was still young, and in my mind sex and love were inextricably linked. A few months into our relationship, I had my college acceptance in hand and began to dream about the handsome, worldly boys with whom I would be able to discuss literature and obscure music. I imagined how easy sex would be with them, how natural and adult it would feel, as opposed to what felt like a struggle between my desire and better judgment with Jerome.

But he made my parents happy in a way that I could never approximate on my own. When I was with him, a piece of me was in place, and I was a whole, acceptable human being to my mother. I was in some ways normal, and they could be happy for that. When Jerome and I broke up, it took me months to tell my parents. I would lie to them and tell them I was going to meet him when I was planning to see my girlfriends. After I revealed the split, my mother still asked about Jerome.

“He’s leaving college,” I would say.

“But he was so nice,” my mom would say.

My college was four hours away by train, up in New England, one of the top places in the country. When I was accepted, no one was surprised—I was always known as a brain—but there was a renewed interest in me, both positive and negative. My teachers smiled at me in the hallways. A few from junior high made the mile-long trek to my high school to congratulate me. The white students who were disappointed in the admissions process—who ended up with their last pick, or somewhere low on their lists—were envious. Some started ignoring me, rolling their eyes, or snickering as I walked by. Two students went so far as to question me outright, calling me an affirmative action baby. It was always something besides that I was simply better than them. Anything but that I was better than them.

At college, at least I didn’t have to deal with the problem of being exceptional. Everyone was exceptional in some way. Almost everyone was smart, and the ones who weren’t were either amazing athletes or super rich—celebrities, aristocrats, or children of celebrities.

I flitted in and out of various groups—black kids, artsy kids, and, for a brief time, stoner kids. I never settled on one group, because I was preoccupied with what was going on in my family. Between that and my studies, I had no room for close friends.

Instead, I stayed close to Aminah, who was in New York studying literature at NYU. I was proud because I recognized for the first time her desire to be independent, the way she was drawn to a life outside of the one she seemed so comfortable leading in our hometown. It was most likely this choice that encouraged me to keep in touch with her after we had moved out of our parents’ houses, that made me call and ask if I could sleep on her floor when I visited New York for a weekend concert, that led me to send e-mails and ask about her new life in the big city. That, in our first few years out of our respective nests, made us friends, not just sisters.

When Aminah left for NYU, Frank headed to Georgetown, and after never being apart for more than a night, they were five hours away from each other with little opportunity to visit. But somehow they seemed more blissfully in love than ever, and I realized that the divergence between our love lives—which had begun in high school—would be permanent.

I met Devonne in my first year at college. Fresh out of my monochrome hometown, where white was right and everything black was wrong, stupid, and ugly (I was a nonentity), I felt like meeting her was a coming-home. She was intelligent, fierce. She wore her hair in neat dreads. She wore horn-rimmed glasses, starched men’s shirts, and designer loafers. She was sharp.

On the first day of our first-year orientation, the administration crammed our entire class into an auditorium, and when they asked if we had any questions, Devonne stood and recited a spoken-word poem, which she would later tell me she revised from one she had performed at slams in high school.

You don’t see me when you pass me in the hallways,

Not the real me,

I’m just a black girl to you, with

Tough nails and

Tough voice.

I’m here.

There was a stunned silence, and then enthusiastic applause. My stomach lurched when she strode into my Africana Studies class the following Monday. I hung around after class, waiting for her to finish her conversation with the professor about Marcus Garvey. (He was a world-class bigot. I won’t celebrate him, she said as our professor beamed at her.)

“I think you’re right about Garvey,” I said as she walked toward me. She smiled.

“Oh yeah?” she said. “Walk with me.”

I told her that where I’d come from, my views and my skin made me a lonely little island. I told her I felt so happy to meet someone like her.

She just nodded along. “You know how many people told me that this week?” We stopped at a forked path on the college green. “I’m headed to the library. I’ll catch you later.”

I was sure that was the last conversation I would have with her, but the next day, I heard someone call my name from across the cafeteria. Devonne came bounding toward me, her dreads bouncing in the air, feet slightly splayed in her loafers.

She dropped a small paperback of C.L.R. James’s Minty Alley on my tray.

“I brought this for you.” She smiled, out of breath. “Where are you sitting?”

Our friendship burned fast and bright from there. Each day we would find each other in the library and spend hours in the stacks reading side by side. We took cigarette breaks together and marveled at the broody boys who kept us company outside, speculating on the love lives of the ones who offered us their lighters.

“I bet he’s great in bed,” Devonne would say, or, “SDS: Small Dick Syndrome. Did you see the way he fixed his hair constantly? Insecure.”

“You’re terrible,” I’d reply, snickering.

At some point she noticed that they showed me more attention. One offered me a cigarette and not her; another spoke to us both, but kept his eyes on me.

“I didn’t think you were interested,” I’d say.

“Of course I’m not interested,” she’d say.

Our friendship ended in the same place it started: in Africana Studies class. We all did oral presentations: Devonne spoke on Marcus Garvey, advancing her thesis that he should be treated in the same way as Hitler and Mussolini. It was bold but with noticeable gaps in thinking. I did a short presentation on Toni Cade Bambara, including an analysis of her role as the editor of notable anthologies of women’s writing. After class, the professor approached me.

“Nice work,” he said.

I looked around for Devonne, but she had already left. She wasn’t in the hallway, or outside in the parking lot, where we normally had a cigarette after class. She wasn’t in the library that day either.

When I saw her the next week, she told me that she’d slept with one of the boys we’d met outside the library who had looked at me. Though she’d feigned disinterest at first, she’d actually slept with him several times. She said she was in love.

“What a jerk,” I exclaimed.

Devonne stared at me, as if she was trying to decode something inside me.

“Yeah,” she said slowly. She flicked her cigarette and turned briskly without her normal air kiss or sarcastic comment, and, for all intents and purposes, she was gone.

My first love was Dean, a philosophy student who played guitar with a band from the local art school on the weekends. He was half Spanish, with pouty pink lips and freckles, impossibly. We met at a concert downtown, and at the end of the night he stroked my face and asked me out for coffee the next week. We went, and halfway into my coffee, I felt myself sinking into the vinyl booth. I knew that whatever happened after this point would be irrevocably different. Before long I was spending whole weekends at his apartment downtown, mornings fucking on his dirty red sheets, afternoons sleepily plodding through our reading assignments. He gave me Sartre and Proust and the Velvet Underground and Bobby “Blue” Bland. He taught me how to blow smoke rings from his Marlboro Reds.

Early on I felt I had nothing to offer Dean except my body. He was a full person and I knew that I wasn’t yet, that I was still growing, that he and our relationship were shunting me into being. I made myself available to him all the time, and it wasn’t long before he’d used me all up, grown bored, decided he needed more.

I grew restless. I could barely focus in class, so I spent most of the day catching up on lessons, and then I stayed up through the night completing my assignments. I saw Dean at the library, smoking his Marlboros on the steps. At first he nodded hello to me with a manner that could be mistaken as warm, but the enthusiasm of those acknowledgments waned as the months went by, and eventually he didn’t acknowledge me at all. He just let his eyes flit over me like I was a piece of stone in the library wall or some other student he hadn’t known, like he hadn’t once breathed, I could love you, you know, on my neck.

Then one day there was a girl—a thin girl whom I’d seen studying in the visual arts library. She had papery skin and a severe brown bob that framed cheekbones like snow-capped hills. She wore vintage dresses that I never could have squeezed into and smoked hand-rolled cigarettes. She looked designed to attract men like Dean, and it sunk in when I saw them together on the steps of the library that this was who he should be with, not me. It was never me.

I had no reference point for heartbreak. My insides felt emptied out, and there was no need for food, no need for sleep. At first I couldn’t work—couldn’t even focus enough to read a chapter without dissolving into tears. Later, work was all I could do to keep the swirling thoughts from coming in, the images of her in my spot on his bed, her eating oatmeal across from him at his kitchen table.

My parents grew into a very comfortable life in their middle age. After I left for college, they sold their house in the suburbs and bought a two-bedroom apartment in an upscale Philadelphia apartment complex designed by I. M. Pei in the 1960s. The three apartment towers overlook the Delaware River and decaying, bullet-ridden Camden, an aging beacon of the city’s relative wealth.

They used the rest of the money from the sale to buy a vacation home outside Johannesburg and a VW Jetta that they kept in the garage. At least once a year, we flew to Johannesburg, and for at least two weeks, we stayed in the house, a modern stucco home with terra cotta tile on the roof. My father employed domestic workers to clean the windows and sweep the driveway while we were away, and to wash our laundry and mop the floors while we were there.

The vacation house sat atop a hill full of other posh, neatly kept homes to the northwest of the city. Within a half hour we could drive to the dusty three-room house my mother grew up in, where my grandfather still lived. The vacation house’s huge picture windows looked off a cliff to the valley of Johannesburg below. From there, you could see the turquoise of the mansions that surrounded us, where my aunts and uncles lived, and, farther away, the red dirt and tin roofs of the townships clustered closely together. This was where my mother came from, and where my grandfather journeyed from to visit us, to spend a peaceful hour outside in his high socks and straw hat, sunning himself on the deck of our infinity pool.

My lover is kind. He is not quick to anger. He is measured and good-natured. Like a child, but not lacking in experience or knowledge. In the circuit of my life, he is the ground. He balances me, allows me to flow at an even rate.

He has red hair and he is not particularly broad or strong, like I had always imagined my one true love would be. My lover is definitely skinny. Try as he might to eat every carbohydrate and piece of red meat in his path, he can never put on any weight.

Yes, as much as I hate to admit it, I always imagined that I would have one true love, who in my later days would define me as much as my career or my personality. He would be a part of me, and we would come together and make another part. The picture wavered slightly over the years—at times I convinced myself that I would be okay alone, or with several partners; for some periods my husband was a wife. But it always came back to this picture: one partner, for the rest of my life.