Heads of the Colored People(18)
“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 ignored 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.