With the Fire on High(13)
I take a deep breath. Because I know he didn’t mean anything by his question. “I get you. And yes, I’m Black on both sides. Although my Puerto Rican side speaks Spanish, and my American side speaks English.”
“I appreciate the race lesson.”
He’s trying to charm me. And I am not here for it. “Did you need something?” I ask, winding around a corner. Who made this boy think I had time for him? Got me out here wasting all my good words.
But then he smiles. Dimples popping out on both cheeks like billboards for joy and I stumble over my own feet. Shit, that smile should come with a trigger warning. Because blao! It’s playing target practice with my emotions. It’s even making me curse, and even though it’s only in my head, I promised I would work on it. Now I’m really annoyed.
“Nah, Santiago. I just wanted to say hello. I’m glad we have this class together. I’d love to try your cooking.”
I narrow my eyes at him. “Was that some weird sexual innuendo?”
His eyes widen and he barks out a laugh. “Dang, yo! I’m just trying to be nice. Get your mind out the gutter!”
“Oh, well, yeah. I guess tasting will be a part of the class.” I stop in front of my English class. Angelica is sitting by the door and I see her already taking down notes. “This is me. . . .” And then because ’Buela didn’t raise me to be rude, “Thanks for walking me to class.”
“No problem, Santi.”
Black Like Me
I’ve lived my whole life having people question what race I am. Not necessarily the homies I grew up with. In Fairhill, we are mostly Spanish-speaking Caribbeans and Philly-raised Black Americans with roots in the South. Which means, in my hood everyone’s parents or great-grandparents got some kind of accent that ain’t a Philly one. But when people from a different neighborhood first meet me, they wonder why I don’t fit certain modes. The Latina grandmothers at the Papi store tsk-tsk when they ask me a question in Spanish and I answer with my chopped-up tongue, or worse, in English. And I don’t have enough skills to tell them ’Buela didn’t raise me speaking much Spanish. I can understand a lot of it because of her, but English is the language I learned at school and watched on TV and, for the most part, even the one we speak at home. I try not to be self-conscious about how little Spanish I know, but some days it feels like not speaking Spanish automatically makes me a Bad Boricua. One who’s forgotten her roots.
But on the flip side, folks wonder if I’m Black American enough. As if my Puerto Rican side cancels out any Blackness, although if we go only according to skin, my Puerto Rican side is as Black as my Black American side. Not to mention, Julio may be a lot of things, but he sure is proud of his African roots and he’s made sure I never forget our history. And ’Buela doesn’t shy away from her Blackness either, even if she’s quieter with how she talks about it. I don’t know how many times someone has asked ’Buela for directions in the street and the moment they hear her accent a surprised “Oh, you Spanish?” slips out of their mouths.
I’m constantly having to give people geography and history lessons on how my grandmother’s hometown is 65 percent Afro–Puerto Rican, on how the majority of slaves were dropped off in the Caribbean and Latin America, on how just because our Black comes with bomba and mofongo doesn’t mean it isn’t valid. And it seems I’m always defending the parts of me that I’ve inherited from my mother: the roots that come from this country, the facts that Aunt Sarah tells me about our people in the Raleigh area, the little sayings she slips into her emails that I know come from her mother, and her mother’s mother, and her mother’s mother’s mother, to the first African mother who touched foot on this here land. The same wisdom I whisper to Babygirl every now and then, a reminder of where, and who, we are from.
This stuff is complicated. But it’s like I’m some long-division problem folks keep wanting to parcel into pieces, and they don’t hear me when I say: I don’t reduce, homies. The whole of me is Black. The whole of me is whole.
The Read
“Who was that you were talking to?” Angelica pops a big wad of red gum into her mouth as the bell rings after English and everyone hustles down the hallway to their lockers.
“Who?” I ask, stealing a stick of gum before she can drop the pack back in her purse.
“Don’t play dumb with me, Emoni,” she says, poking me in the rib. “You don’t talk to any of the guys at school and I definitely saw one fine-ass dude walk you to class. He new?”
Caught. “Oh, we have Advisory together and the culinary arts class. Malachi. Transferred from somewhere in Newark or something.”
“Newark? Oh, he a brave soul bringing his ass over here. A very cute brave soul. . . . So, how did that class go? You seemed nervous when I saw you at lunch.”
Angelica is looking at me, oblivious to the mob of lost-looking freshmen coming her way. I pull her to me so she doesn’t get bumped. “It was okay. We talked about butter knives. Did you talk about tools in your art class?”
Angelica gives me a puzzled look before stopping in front of our locker. She turns the dial that opens up her top half.
“Tools? We went over the different design programs we’ll be using. We won’t start actual projects for a week or two while we learn the systems.”