The Vanishing Half(25)

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THEY CALLED HER TAR BABY.

Midnight. Darky. Mudpie. Said, Smile, we can’t see you. Said, You so dark you blend into the chalkboard. Said, Bet you could show up naked to a funeral. Bet lightning bugs follow you in the daytime. Bet when you swim it look like oil. They made up lots of jokes, and once, well into her forties, she would recite a litany of them at a dinner party in San Francisco. Bet cockroaches call you cousin. Bet you can’t find your own shadow. She was amazed by how well she remembered. At that party, she forced herself to laugh, even though she’d found nothing funny at the time. The jokes were true. She was black. Blueblack. No, so black she looked purple. Black as coffee, asphalt, outer space, black as the beginning and the end of the world.

At first, her grandmother tried to keep her out of the sun. Gave her a big gardening hat, tied the straps tight around her chin even though it choked her. She couldn’t run with the hat on, and she loved to run, which couldn’t be helped, although Adele begged her to wait, at least, until the sun went down. She’d spent her summers reading indoors, or when she felt like she was going crazy from being cooped up, she chased shade around the yard, wearing the big choking hat, long sleeves clinging to her sweaty arms. She would get no darker, although she seemed to the longer she lived in Mallard. A black dot in the school pictures, a dark speck on the pews at Sunday Mass, a shadow lingering on the riverbank while the other children swam. So black that you could see nothing but her. A fly in milk, contaminating everything.

In homeroom, she sat in front of Lonnie Goudeau, the varsity pitcher, who threw paper balls at her back all period. He was gray-eyed with auburn hair licking up the back of his neck, his cheeks splashed with freckles. A beautiful boy. So she prickled when she imagined him staring at her, rolling up his sleeves, his forearms so light you could see the brown hair, and flexing, the paper pinched between his fingers. Then she felt the soft pat against her neck, the boys behind her snickering. She never turned around. Once, Mr. Yancy caught Lonnie and sentenced him to detention. On her way out, Jude passed him wiping down the chalkboard and he smirked at her, sliding the eraser through the dust. She replayed that moment her whole walk home. His lips, caught between a grimace and a smile.

Lonnie Goudeau was the first person to call her Tar Baby. A month after she moved to Mallard, he found a copy of Brer Rabbit in the class bin and gleefully tapped the shiny black blob on the cover. “Look, it’s Jude,” he said, and she was so startled that he knew her name, she didn’t realize that he was making fun of her until the whole class dissolved into laughter. He was chastened for disrupting silent reading, the book quickly removed by their blushing teacher, but that night after dinner, Jude asked her mother what a tar baby was. Her mother paused, dipping their dirty plates into the sink.

“Just an old story,” she said. “Why?”

“A boy called me that today.”

Her mother slowly dried her hands on the towel, then knelt in front of her.

“He just wants to get a rise out of you,” she said. “Ignore him. He’ll get bored and cut all that out.”

But he didn’t. Lonnie flecked mud at her socks and threw her books into the trash. Jostled her chair leg during exams, yanked the ribbons in her hair, sang “Tutti-frutti, dark Judy” as soon as she was in earshot. On the last day of fifth grade, he tripped her down the school steps and she scraped her knee. At the kitchen table, her grandma pulled her leg onto her lap, gently swabbing the blood with a cotton ball.

“Maybe he likes you,” Maman said. “Little boys always act real mean to girls they like.”

She tried to imagine Lonnie holding her hand, carrying her books home from school, kissing her, even, his long eyelashes tickling her cheeks. Sitting beside him in a movie theater, or on the top of the Ferris wheel at the carnival, Lonnie’s arm around her. But all she could picture was Lonnie splashing her in a mud puddle or sticking chewing gum in her hair or calling her a dumb bitch, Lonnie punching her until her lip burst open and her eye swelled shut. After, her father would always storm out while her mother sobbed on the floor, her face buried in the couch cushion. Once, he didn’t leave right away. Instead, he pulled her mother’s face into his stomach, petting her hair. Her mother whimpered but didn’t pull away, as if she were comforted by his touch.

Better to picture Lonnie beating on her. That other thing—that soft part—terrified her even more.



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BEFORE THE INSULTS AND JOKES, before the taunting, the muddied socks, the kicked chairs, the empty lunch bench, before all of that, there were questions. What was her name? Where’d she come from and why was she here? On her first day of school, Louisa Rubidoux leaned across their shared desk and asked who was that lady walking with her earlier.

“My mama,” Jude said. Wasn’t it obvious? She’d walked her to school, held her hand. Who else would she be?

“But not your real mama, right?” Louisa said. “Y’all don’t look nothin alike.”

Jude paused, then said, “I look like my daddy.”

“Well, where’s he at?”

She shrugged, even though she knew. Back in D.C., where they’d left him. She missed him already even though she could still see that bruise on her mother’s neck, even though she could remember all the bruises she’d seen on her body over time, dark splotches on that strange topography. Once, at the swimming pool, she’d stared as her mother started to change in their stall before stopping, midway, when she discovered a fading bruise on her thigh. She quietly put her clothes back on, then told Jude she’d decided to just sit by the pool today and watch her. When they arrived home, her father greeted her mother with a kiss, and Jude realized that if she tried, she could pretend that the bruises came from someplace else. Her relationship with one parent magically untethered to the other. So when she thought of her daddy, he was sprawled beside her on the rug, flipping through the comics. Not dragging her mother by her hair into the bedroom—no, that was some other man. And after the broken glass was swept, the blood wiped off the tile, after her mother retreated into the bathroom, a bag of ice pressed against her face, her real daddy returned, smiling, stroking her cheek.