Heads of the Colored People(20)
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“They racist up at that school? I can’t stand cocky white people,” Violet said one day while they sat at their usual table, near the flower divider in the mall’s arboretum. Some white guys from Hillwood sat across the way, laughing loudly.
Fatima didn’t like to talk about her school, but everyone in the Inland Empire knew Westwood and Hillwood, rivals on and off the football field. “I don’t think so,” Fatima said.
“What do you mean you don’t think so? Either something’s racist or it’s not.”
No one at school poked out his tongue and called her that, like they did in the poem Wally read, but Fatima thought about Wally, his affectations, and Principal Lee.
“It’s not always comfortable,” she said. “It can be awkward, but I’m awkward.”
“You sure are.” Violet laughed, and Fatima laughed, too. She was learning to do more of that, and to wear a kind of self-assuredness with her side-swooped Aaliyah bangs.
In fact, most interactions were easier with Violet than they were with others. Violet understood things. Fatima never had to explain why she might wrap her hair in a silk scarf at bedtime or why she always carried a tube of hand cream to prevent not only chapped hands, but also allover ashiness. Those shared practices validated Fatima, and so did Violet’s understanding of Fatima’s fears about her body. “Sometimes I just feel horrible about all of it, the sweating, the bleeding. I don’t always feel like a regular girl, you know?” Fatima said one day, “But what is normal anyway?”
“Word, that’s deep,” Violet said, and explained that she, too, felt the weight of her body, because it did not look “like what people expect black to be.” In spite of her seeming confidence, Violet confided, she had a complex about her albinism. Fatima understood when Violet intimated that albinism marked her as both desirable for her lightness, her hair color, her eye color, and yet despised for some perceived physical untruth. Fatima had seen the way people glanced two and three times at Violet, deciding where to place her and whether she warranted any of the benefits of whiteness. Violet could call other black people like Fatima white, but to be called white herself pushed Violet to violent tears. Just ask her ex-boyfriend and her ex-friend Kandice from middle school, who had called her Patti Mayonnaise in a fit of anger and gotten a beatdown that made her wet her pants like Fatima’s preschool friend.
“Why Patti Mayonnaise?” Fatima said.
“You know, from Doug, she was the black girl on the DL who looked white, and mayonnaise is white. It’s a stupid joke.”
“Patti was black?” Fatima said.
“Girl, a whole lot of everybody got black in them,” Violet started.
Fatima had heard some of Violet’s theories before during a game they sometimes played on the phone. The list included Jennifer Beals, Mariah Carey, and “that freaky girl from Wild Things,” Denise Richards, and now, apparently, Patti Mayonnaise. When Fatima suggested Justin Timberlake, Violet said, “Nah, he’s like that Wally kid at your school.”
The nuances of these and other things Emily, Fatima’s best friend since second grade, just couldn’t understand, no matter how earnestly she tried or how many questions she asked, like why they couldn’t share shampoo when she slept over, or “What does ‘For us, by us’ even mean,” and why Fatima’s top lip was darker than her bottom one.
Fatima picked up some theories on her own, too, without Violet or the literature. The thing about the brown top lip and the pink lower one, Fatima had pieced together after what she learned from Violet and what she had learned at school, was that you could either read them as two souls trying to merge into a better self, or you could conceal them under makeup and talk with whichever lip was convenient for the occasion. At school and with Emily, she talked with her pink lip, and with Violet, she talked with her brown one, and that created tension only if she thought too much about it.
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Fatima passed the time at school by imagining the time she would spend after school with Violet, who promised to teach her how to flirt better on their next excursion and to possibly, eventually, hook her up with one of her cousins, but not one of her brothers, because “Most of them aren’t good for anything except upsetting your mother, if you want to do that.” Fatima did not want to do that.
Now at school when Wally the Wigger looked like he was even thinking about saying something to her, Fatima made a face that warned, “Don’t even look like you’re thinking about saying something to me,” and he obeyed. In her mind, she not only said this aloud, but said it in Violet’s voice.
She didn’t mind the laughter in her parents’ eyes when she tried out a new phrase or hairstyle, because it was all working. There was something prettier about her now, too, and people seemed to see it before Fatima did, because a guy named Rolf at Westwood—a tall brunette in her history class, with whom she’d exchanged a few eye rolls over Wally—asked her for her phone number.
Without pausing to consider anything, she gave it to him.
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IT MIGHT SEEM, up to this point, that Fatima simultaneously wore braces, glasses, and forehead acne, when you hardly needed to glance to see the gloss of her black hair or the sheen on her shins, with or without lotion. Fatima knew this truth instinctively, but buried its warmth under the shame of early-childhood teasing and a preference for melancholy self-pity. It was more romantic to feel ugly than to pretend she couldn’t hold her head just right, unleash her beautiful teeth, and make a skeptical man kneel at her skirt’s hem. She just didn’t have the practice, but she was hopeful that she might get it, with Rolf or one of Violet’s cousins, hopeful that the transformation had taken hold.