In case you are not already reaching for the Nerd Alert button, around this time, I started reading three newspapers a day. And that became an obsession, like times tables and square roots. I would figure out exactly down to the minute how long I could be in the shower, how long it would take me to get ready, and still have time to read the newspapers. The first two, the Tri-Valley Herald and the Valley Times, were exactly how they sound. Here’s an actual headline in the Valley Times, which I cut out and laminated for my civics class: MEXICANS ROB THE MALL. Meanwhile, the “Mexicans” were from, like, the next town over, and they probably knocked over a Sunglass Hut.
So those papers didn’t take me that long. But then I would read the Oakland Tribune, which was much more involved. On the rare occasion that I didn’t finish, I would take whatever was left and I would go through it in my first-period class, usually an English class. If I didn’t, I just couldn’t focus. I honestly don’t know what came first—a love of reading the newspapers, or wanting to be Super Negro, the magical special black person who has all the knowledge and is never caught out there looking ignorant. “She is so knowledgeable” is what I lived for. “That black girl is really something.”
My other job was to be popular, which I approached with the same strategy as my studies. Meaning it was everything.
Sleepovers were the thing among the girls, and you had to be there or else you would be “discussed.” I had all the sleepover worries preteens have about pranks and fears that I would smell by morning. But my hair was also a problem. I didn’t want to go through the normal ritual that I did at home, wrapping my hair with a scarf, because it would draw attention to my blackness and therefore my difference. When in Rome, do as the white girls do. So I would put my hair in a ponytail or a bun and try to keep as still as possible all night—as we call it, “sleeping pretty.” But eventually slumber takes over and you become a human being. By the time I woke up in the morning, my hair would be unruly.
“Oh my God, you look like Buckwheat!” someone invariably said, pointing to the mass of hair on my head. Eddie Murphy’s SNL version of Buckwheat was still fresh and popular, all hair and teeth and “Ohtay!”
“Do Buckwheat!”
And I would do it. I would go into the “Buckwheat Got Shot” routine, with my hands in the air like Eddie’s. Every time I said, “Ohtay,” the girls would die.
Now that I was willingly their clown, the directives began.
“Act like you put your finger in a socket.”
“Pretend you’re a Kewpie doll.”
I pulled my hair up to make it stand on end. Making them laugh gave me the illusion of agency and control. Minstrelsy makes the audience comfortable. Now that I am on the other side of it, and proud of my blackness, they wouldn’t know what to do with me. People don’t know what to do with you if you are not trying to assimilate.
Nevertheless, I did manage to create real, lasting friendships with other girls during this period. And we liked to have fun. We had our first kegger in seventh grade, right before school let out for summer. We were farting around in a park and we saw these older kids hide their pony keg in the bushes. We waited for them to leave, snuck over, got their pony keg, and rolled it right on over to my friend Missy Baldwin’s house. None of us knew how to open it, so we hammered a screwdriver into the side until we made a hole and were able to drain the beer into a bucket.
And then we had all this beer! So we called people—meaning boys—and they biked over to Missy’s house. There was just this trove of Huffys and BMXs dropped in her front yard as kids raced to the back practically shouting, “Beer!” The house got trashed and kids put her lawn furniture into her pool. This wasn’t even at night and it was in a planned community. But her parents were hippies and were like, “Missy. Man, that’s not cool.”
That wouldn’t have worked with my parents, but they had no idea where I was anyway. They put in long days at their telecommunications jobs—my dad in San Jose, my mom in Oakland, both a one-hour commute away. My older sister, Kelly, who acted as if she had birthed herself, was given a very long leash, but she had a lot of responsibility, too. If anything happened, my sister had to take care of it. If I had a dentist appointment, she would have to take time off from school activities to play chauffeur. Class projects, homework—she was my Google before there was Google. In high school, she loved sports but didn’t have my natural athleticism. She quickly recognized the gifts she had and segued into being a team manager and coaching youth basketball. Everything she wore was from Lerner, and she became a manager there at sixteen. There she was in her blazers with the huge shoulder pads. I idolized her, but also took her guidance and intelligence for granted.
She and Tracy, my little sister, had the caregiver-child relationship because of the eleven years between them. I was in the middle, completely under my family’s radar. So I created a family of my friends. They were everything to me, and as a result, I was hardly ever home.
I only drank with friends, enjoying the game of getting the alcohol as much as drinking it. We’d steal from our parents or con older relatives into buying it for us. We used to play a drinking game called vegetable. Each person would choose a vegetable and try to say it without showing our teeth, and then we’d give someone another vegetable to say. You’d always pick something tough, like “rhubarb” or “asparagus” or “russet potatoes.” If you showed your teeth—by laughing, for instance—you had to pound a Keystone Light or whatever contraband we’d gotten our hands on that evening. And it doesn’t take a lot to laugh when you’re drunk on cheap beer and high, which, oftentimes, we were.
But there were little matters of etiquette in these situations that reminded me of my place. When you shared a can of beer, the directive was always “Don’t nigger-lip it.” It meant don’t get your mouth all over it.
Another common term was “nigger-rig.” To nigger-rig something was to MacGyver it or fix it in a half-ass way—to wit, opening a pony keg with a screwdriver. Sometimes people would catch themselves saying “nigger” in front of me.
“Oh there’s niggers and there’s, you know, cool black people,” they’d say to excuse it. “You’re not like them.”
In my English class in ninth grade, we read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn aloud. The teacher made us take alternating paragraphs in order of where we sat in class. We were seated alphabetically by name, so as a “U” I was in the back of the class. Twain uses the word “nigger” exactly 219 times in the book. I would count the paragraphs to read ahead and see if there were any “niggers” in what I had to say. Each time a kid said “nigger,” the whole class turned their heads to watch my response. Some turned to look at me just before they read it aloud, wincing in an apology that only made me more aware of the blackness I was trying so hard to escape. Others turned to smile as they said it, aiming “nigger” right at me.
But most times it felt like kids at my school simply forgot I was black. Perversely, I was relieved when they did. I had so completely stopped being black to these people that they could speak to me as a fellow white person.
“Nigger” wasn’t the only slur slung around at the few people of color who dotted the overwhelmingly white student population. But being so focused on my own situation, I wasn’t always proficient in racist slang. Sure, I could decipher jokes about the Latino kids and the couple of Asian girls, but it took me a long time to realize people weren’t calling our classmate Mehal a “kite.” In Pleasanton you were either Catholic or Mormon, and Mehal was proudly Jewish. She invited us all to her bat mitzvah. Nobody went. Our belief system was “Jews killed Jesus, Jews are bad.” Mehal flew the flag, and so she was out, but when we found out Eric Wadamaker was Jewish, it was like he’d had a mask ripped off at the end of Scooby-Doo.