“You know Waddy’s a Jew?”
“Whaaaat? But he’s so cool.”
The pressure to assimilate infused every choice we made, no matter our race. Kids who didn’t use the slurs certainly didn’t speak up against classmates or parents using them. They adopted the language or they kept silent. Because to point out inequality in the town would mean Pleasanton was not perfect. And Pleasanton had to be perfect.
WHEN I WAS THIRTEEN, MY PARENTS BEGAN SENDING ME BACK TO OMAHA alone to spend summers with my mother’s mother. It was at my request; my older sister was going off to college and I was looking for more freedom. As soon as the plane landed, I heard a sound like the sprinklers of California when they started up, that sharp zzt-zzt, but at a constant hum. It was the sound of insects. Cicadas provided the backdrop to my Omaha summers.
My grandmother brought my cousin Kenyatta to the airport to meet me that first year. A year younger than me, she was effortlessly cool. My grandmother raised Kenyatta while her mother, Aunt Carla, was in and out of jail. Grandma also raised Kenyatta’s little brother. Aunt Carla was never out for more than a year and a half. She was awesome, don’t get me wrong; she just had a problem with drugs. Kenyatta was very thin, like me, with really big eyes and chocolate-brown skin. Her lips literally looked like four bubbles, briefly joining on the edge of bursting. “Those lips,” boys always said in admiration, making kissing faces at her.
Kenyatta gave me access to the cool black kids in the neighborhood. She had all these tough friends, some of whom had already been to juvie. They were all pretty and all having sex.
She had told her friends her cousin from California was coming, so a bunch of them waited outside Grandma’s house to meet me. To them California was three things: beaches, celebrities, and gangs. They came ready to talk to me about what I had seen of the Crips and the Bloods.
“Hi there,” I said, getting out of the car.
Their faces sank. It was over.
“Oh, Jesus,” her friend Essence said. “Your cousin is white, Kenyatta.”
“You’re an Oreo,” said this boy Sean.
It wasn’t a surprise, but it wasn’t something to get upset about. I had hoped to get off the plane and slip into a new life. Be a Janet Jackson doing Charlene on Diff’rent Strokes, or, my greatest wish, Lisa Bonet on The Cosby Show. The cool black girl that Pleasanton could never appreciate. But I was still just me. Luckily, I was under Kenyatta’s protection. They could tease me, but only so much.
“Did you bring the tapes?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said, opening my carry-on to pull out two cassettes. She had asked me to tape California radio stations so her crew could press play and be transported to the beaches with the celebrities and the gangbangers.
We all went upstairs and crowded into her room, which would now also become my room. My grandmother had crammed two twin beds in there, so we all sat down. Kenyatta couldn’t get that tape in her boom box fast enough.
Everyone leaned in as she pressed play. Crowded House’s “Don’t Dream It’s Over” filled the room.
“What the fuck is this?” asked Sean.
“It’s the radio back home,” I said. “This is what they play in California.”
“Do they play L.A. Dream Team?” asked Kenyatta. “World Class Wreckin’ Cru?”
I pretended to know who they were, then remembered the radio station’s tag line. “Um,” I said. “They play the hits.”
I’d taped 120 minutes of the Top 40 of Pleasanton. At first they gave it a chance. Heart. Whitesnake. They gave up at Tiffany.
Kenyatta put in a New Edition tape, and my heart leapt. I was obsessed with them, the few black boys who showed up on MTV. We girls bonded right there, talking about Bobby Brown leaving the group and Johnny Gill coming in. And which one of us Ralph Tresvant would pick out of a crowd.
I could hold my own talking about New Edition, but I felt real green on being black. And everyone was black in my grandmother’s North Omaha neighborhood. Beyond New Edition, I wasn’t up on anything when it came to being black. My grandma lived on the edge of what was considered “a bad area,” and it was its own world, without white people. The way people talked about white folks when there were no white folks around was dramatically different—just as white folks spoke differently about black people when they thought black people weren’t around, except in Pleasanton, where they forgot I was black because I blended in so well. I began studying my cousin Kenyatta and her friends to relearn blackness. Otherwise, I would be dismissed as “corny,” which was the death kiss in Omaha. To be corny there was the equivalent of being labeled a “nerd” in Pleasanton—you could not come back from it. No boy would even consider coming near you. Being off-limits and forever friend-zoned was a given as the black girl in Pleasanton. But in Omaha, I had a shot at getting boys to like me the way I liked them. I couldn’t blow it.
I earned respect pretty quickly, and I’m sure a lot of that had to do with being Kenyatta’s cousin. Mostly I did it by keeping a poker face and not saying anything, no matter how surprised or confused I was by something people did or said. Nobody tried to mess with me.
I liked North Omaha from the jump—the dampness in the air, and how the sun never really shone. Somehow, though, the few white folks we saw on trips to the mall were all kind of tanned in this ruddy color that white people turn when they’re overheated. Everyone just lived out on their blocks, hanging back, chilling, talking shit, flirting. Every so often, the sky would suddenly turn black and everyone would start running because there was a tornado coming. As soon as it blew by, everyone came back outside to the streets.
It was Midwest summer, when there’s nothing to do. We were kids with no jobs, so every morning the conversation went like this: “Where are we gonna go today?” “What boy’s house can we walk to?” “Whose parents aren’t home?” “Who has a car?” Just finding somebody with a car was incredibly rare. In Pleasanton, everybody had a car. But in Omaha, people got around through what they called “jitneys”: elderly people that you knew your whole life would say, “Hey, call me if you need me to get to the store. Just give me three dollars.”
Teenagers even drank differently in North Omaha. It wasn’t the binge drinking of mixed drinks in plastic cups, like in Pleasanton. If you were kicking back on the stoop you had a forty or a wine cooler. The penny candy store was right next to the liquor store, so when we hung out in front of the candy store, folks might have thought we were there to get candy, but we were really waiting on a mark. When you found one, you would shoulder-tap the guy. “Heeeey, can you get me a forty of Mickey’s big mouth?” (Mickey’s “big mouth” is a malt liquor also known as a “grenade,” for the shape of the bottle it comes in.) It was never tough.
It was a very exciting time in my life, and there was a bit of danger that felt glamorous. The summer I was thirteen, crack started to show up in North Omaha. My aunt Carla also got out of jail. I saw her as effortlessly cool and admired her gift for always having guys around. She was staying with a boyfriend, even though she always had a home at my grandmother’s if she needed it. The guys who she introduced me to were always really nice, and only later would you find out that so-and-so was involved in one of the largest drug busts in the history of the Midwest. Aunt Carla came over to Grandma’s soon after she was sprung and saw a letter from my parents. They were sending me eighty dollars’ cash a week that summer to give to my grandmother. Selfish me kept that cash, of course.