Beyond the Point(3)

It was the same story everywhere she went. But Dani worked too hard to believe in foregone conclusions. Anything was possible. Even now, she knew she could surprise herself and change her mind at the last minute. But she wouldn’t. Whether she wanted to admit it or not, deep in her psyche, there was something about this day that felt as though it had already happened. Like she could remember it if she closed her eyes and imagined herself from the future.

Grabbing a Pop-Tart from the counter, Dani stuffed her AP Physics homework in her backpack and took the keys to the family sedan from the hook by the door.

“I’m going!” she yelled to no one.

At that moment, her mother, Harper McNalley, shuffled into the kitchen and looked her daughter up and down with the warm disdain of a woman who thought she’d raised her child better. Five foot nothing, Dani’s mother had metal-rimmed glasses and facial expressions that spoke louder than words. Her eyes grew large as she scanned Dani’s choice of wardrobe: sneakers, jeans, and a loose-fitting Nike T-shirt.

“What?” said Dani, sticking her hip out.

Harper reached for the coffee carafe and filled her travel mug. “Why don’t you do something with your hair?” She swirled the carafe through the air, indicating her daughter’s head. “Fix that situation.”

Ever since she was young, Dani had worn her hair in a spiky ponytail. The edges near her forehead were frayed and broken, but athletic pre-wrap headbands did a decent job of keeping the wild parts off her face. She knew her mother was annoyed she hadn’t made an appointment to get her hair relaxed at the salon. But there was no time for that nonsense. Dani didn’t have the patience to sit in a chair and have her head doused with chemicals. There were better things to do with her time. Plus, if they were going to put her picture in the paper, it might as well look like her. Afro and all.

“Go on,” her mother said, pressing her. “Comb it. They should at least know you’re a girl.”

Begrudgingly, Dani ran back upstairs to the hall bathroom, dropped her backpack by the door, and stared at the light-skinned black girl in the mirror. A constellation of freckles graced her face, as if God had decided at the last minute to splatter dark paint against a light brown canvas. Eighteen, with the attitude and swagger to go with it, Dani pulled a brush through her tangled hair and smothered the ends with oil.

They should at least know you’re a girl. Of course they knew she was a girl! She had boobs, for God’s sake. She played women’s basketball. Just because she didn’t wear makeup or wear skirts didn’t make her less of a woman. Her mother of all people should have known that. Harper McNalley was a chemical engineer—a black woman at the height of a white man’s profession. At times, Dani thought her mom was the wisest, most progressive person in the world. Then she’d go and say a thing like that.

A heavy fist pounded against the bathroom door three times in a row. Bang, bang, bang.

“Just a minute!” Dani shouted.

“Dani, I’ve got to go!”

High-pitched and incessant, her little brother’s voice had yet to change. She could imagine Dominic standing outside the door with his little Steve Urkel glasses, holding his crotch and crossing his ankles. Dominic was a confident little boy, always reading some book too advanced for his age. A few nights earlier, he’d recited a Shakespearean soliloquy for the family at dinner. She loved him for how fiercely he chose to be himself. Of course, their father would have liked it better if their talents had been switched at birth, Dani knew. Tom McNalley had hoped to have an athletic son and an artistic daughter. But realizing there was no changing his children, he’d enrolled Dominic in every music lesson, acting class, and audiovisual club the greater Columbus area had to offer. And when Dani showed promise on the driveway basketball court, he’d signed her up for club teams, private coaches, and ultimately, the AAU team that had shaped Dani into the point guard she was today. All opportunities available to white children were equally available to the McNalleys: Tom and Harper had worked hard for that to be so.

Dani knew the stories. Her parents had both grown up in the South—her mother was among some of the first children to integrate her white North Carolina elementary school. After meeting at Howard University in the late 1970s, Tom and Harper uprooted and replanted in Ohio, hoping to chart a new future for their family. They lived in a gated community, the children attended great public schools, and they had two cars in the driveway. By every measure, they had “made it”—whatever that meant. Dani still wondered sometimes if they’d swung the pendulum a bit too far. They were the only black family within a twenty-mile radius, and though it didn’t bother Dani to be different, she wondered if there was something she was missing, some experience that she’d lost, in the shelter of their suburban zip code.

“Dani, I must say, I’ve never seen a black person with freckles,” her friend’s mother had said once, as if Dani were a new species at the local zoo. “Where does that come from? You know, in your gene pool?”

At the time, Dani just shrugged it off and said she wasn’t sure. But if she were asked that same question today, she would say, “Mrs. Littleton, no offense, but I would never ask about your gene pool.” Or, more likely: “That’s easy. One of your ancestors probably raped one of mine.”

Smiling, Dani would of course add that she was joking. But every joke comes with a dose of truth, and sure enough, when Dani’s aunt had dug into the family history several years earlier, it turned out their great-great-grandmother, Scarlet McNalley, had birthed eight children with her slave owner’s son. That was why light skin ran in the family genes.