And I got it. Kevin Marshall tongue-kissed me on the corner of Forty-ninth and Fort, right by the bus stop.
I’m pretty, I thought. Kevin Marshall, this light-skinned boy with green eyes who is not supposed to find me attractive, found me pretty enough to kiss. On the level playing field of Omaha, a guy like Kevin was a huge get, having his pick of the pecking order of skin color that is in place in black and brown communities across the world. And he had picked a chocolate girl like me.
Then I thought, Maybe black boys like me.
THE NEXT SUMMER, WHEN I WAS FIFTEEN, I EASED BACK INTO MY BLACKNESS even more quickly. But North Omaha had changed more, too. It was no longer the Disney version of gang culture, it was real. The buzz in the air now seemed more scary than exhilarating. Boys would pick Kenyatta and me up to go for a ride, and we’d end up going over the bridge to Council Bluffs because they needed to pick up some money or deliver a package. It continually felt like the beginning of a bad movie. These were not bad people. These were regular kids who got swept up in the frenzy of having to be in a gang and do gang shit to impress each other. Drive-by shootings started happening, and kids began to get killed. Something very bad was coming.
My cousin was dating this guy named Ryan. He and his friend Lucky were always around. Lucky always had cornrows that never appeared freshly braided. They drove vintage El Caminos, restored status symbols they called “Old Schools.” You saw these cars, lovingly and expensively restored by masters, and knew these guys had money. One night Ryan did a drive-by, shooting someone in the neck and paralyzing him. We saw a police sketch on the news and my grandma said, “Doesn’t that look like your friend Ryan?”
“Nope,” said Kenyatta.
“No way,” I said, thinking, Yep, that’s Ryan.
He came to the door later that night, after Grandma went to sleep. Kenyatta let him in quickly, and we sat on the steps leading upstairs. Ryan had the gun, and he placed it on the ground by his feet. We all stared at it.
“Can I hold it?” Kenyatta asked.
He picked it up by the handle and she held it, aiming away from us. She looked at it with a mixture of admiration and fear. This gun had been fired and it had paralyzed someone. The whole town was looking for Ryan, and here he was.
“Can I?” I asked.
Kenyatta handed it to me, and I held it like you would a caterpillar, with my fingers splayed out not to touch anything. It was so heavy. I thought, That’s why he accidentally shot that kid. It’s probably just too big a gun for him to aim.
“Can I stay here?” asked Ryan.
It hadn’t occurred to me he would ask that, but it obviously had to Kenyatta, who nodded quickly. “We’ll put you in the basement,” she said. “Grandma won’t know.” And we did. For three weeks, we brought him food. Peanut butter sandwiches we made covertly, leftovers from dinner. Beer when we had it. We kept him company, talking about what was going on in the neighborhood. I watched some detective show where they accused this woman of “harboring a fugitive.” I felt like I had a secret. I was protecting a good guy who made a mistake.
Police knew it was Ryan who had done the shooting, and it became clear to him that this hideout plan wouldn’t last. He turned himself in. He went to prison. Lucky was killed the following summer, leading everyone to think they were the first one to say, “Guess he wasn’t so lucky.” Another friend got shot and had to wear a colostomy bag for the rest of his life. Kevin joined a gang, then his best friend Dennis died. A girl I knew stabbed a jitney driver rather than pay him five dollars. He lived. He’d known her since she was a baby and was able to tell police exactly where she lived, who her grandfather was, hell, who her great-grandmother was. Another boy that I thought was so cute shot up a Bronco Burgers. The mom of one of our friends decided she had to get her son out of Omaha. She sent him to Denver, and he got mixed up with gangs there. He got killed, too.
None of these people changed. The environment around them did. They were all good people who made choices that ended up having insane consequences. But their hearts never changed. They were playing roles assigned to them, the same way I did in Pleasanton.
WHEN I WOULD GO BACK TO PLEASANTON AT THE END OF THOSE Nebraska summers, I didn’t share any of those stories. The kids I went to school with didn’t deserve to hear them. They were mine, and I knew I could never convince my friends of the innate goodness of Kenyatta, Kevin, and Lucky, anyway. Of Ryan, even. So I would simply become the invisible black girl again. I checked my language, the cadence of my walk, and the confidence of just being in my skin. The older I got, the more resentful I became of these reentry periods. People in California noticed my attitude was different. I was quicker to anger at slights. I wouldn’t play Buckwheat.
I especially struggled back home after the summer of hiding Ryan. I don’t know if my older sister, Kelly, noticed, or if I just got lucky, but she took me under her wing. By then she was in college, starting out at USC before transferring to San Jose State. Immediately at USC, she found a very cool group of black friends. I was so jealous. When she got away from the house, she stopped having to be my mother-sister. She was just Kelly, and our relationship changed for the better.
When I was fifteen, she took me to a black frat party at San Jose State. It was like she gave me the keys to this kingdom of cool black people who valued education and fun. They were just worldly, and cool and dope and sexy. In the way that Omaha gave me an outlet for my Pleasanton frustration, my sister’s world of college became a new outlet. I looked around at these students and saw black excellence. I met an Alpha Phi Alpha brother named Darryl, who talked to me for a long time that night. He even gave me his number. I gave him a fake number in return because I had lied about my age and this was a man. But I held onto that piece of paper for years.
That night made me see the either/or schism I was trapped in. Between Pleasanton and Omaha, I was caught in a dual consciousness: who I had to be when I was around my own people, and who I had to be in high school. Now, it’s easy to see how caught I was in that back-and-forth mental chess match of trying to be okay in both worlds. “Two warring ideals in one dark body,” as Du Bois wrote; the dark body of a young girl. Each was me, but the constant code-switching—changing my language, demeanor, and identity expression to fit in—left me exhausted.
“You were fly, dope, and amazing from birth,” I would tell that girl now. “From the second you took your first breath, you were worthwhile and valid. And I’m sorry you had to wait so long to learn that for yourself.”
two
SEX MISEDUCATION
In the fifth grade, the girls were all ushered into the school multipurpose room, where it was explained to us that WE COULD GET PREGNANT AT ANY MOMENT. Well, at least our period would strike any minute, which meant we could hypothetically conceive a child.
The problem is, Miss Brackett forgot to include the part about how we would get pregnant. She just left it at “it could just happen.” No one was brave enough to ask questions. And if you don’t know how you get pregnant, just that it MIGHT HAPPEN AT ANY MOMENT, it’s a little scary. I would lie awake at night in my room, clutching my bed-in-a-bag twin sheets to my chin and wondering what could happen to impregnate me. If you were raised Catholic like I was, you already know from Sunday school that nothing really has to happen. You could go to sleep and wake up carrying Baby Jesus. I’ve seen countless paintings of the Annunciation, where Mary “accepts” the news that she is pregnant. But my favorite is Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s at the Tate Britain in London. Mary is in bed, giving the angel Gabriel a bleary-eyed look of “Are you fucking kidding me right now?”