Heads of the Colored People(19)
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.