“Nope, I’m just black-to-basics.”
* * *
• • •
I start working on kindergarten tour and visit dates for the school year, even as I repeatedly check for a text from Etta. My phone finally pings, stopping me from wondering if I should call the San Francisco County missing persons hotline.
Of course she made it.
I turn back to my computer. Even after thirteen years of kindergarten tours and visits I still find myself eager to show off Fairchild to potential families. The ohhhs and ahhhs from moms, dads, and grandparents remind me of how lucky I felt when I was a student at Fairchild.
It’s quite possible I peaked before the turn of the century. At least according to the Fairchild Country Day yearbook and my head of school, Dr. Pearson. During my years as a student he had loved to trot me out to big donors to show that Fairchild was doing its part to not only accept but also to successfully educate a diverse student body. We both wanted to prove that I was not just a product of affirmative action, as many in the Fairchild community in the eighties and nineties wanted to believe. I had, in fact, earned and retained an honest seat in the school, sealed with a spot on the honor roll every semester. Making honor roll should have been all the proof I needed to show I belonged, but while diversity efforts of private schools were all the rage in the nineties, every day I still had to go above and beyond any other student to prove being a member of the graduating class was no fluke.
With an audience seated in a living room with floor-to-ceiling views of the Golden Gate Bridge and the Bay, Dr. Pearson would loudly rattle the phlegm in his throat. It would take three or four additional wet coughs to get the attention of the moneyed alumni sipping Napa Valley Chardonnay and chatting about whether Danielle Steel’s new book was based on a fellow Pacific Heights neighbor.
“Allow me to introduce you to Josephine Bordelon.” Light applause would follow, and I would join Dr. Pearson at the front of the room. “In our committed diversity efforts, Fairchild gets triple points for Miss Bordelon: She is African American (obviously); is being raised by her aunt Viv, our beloved school cook [lots of knowing nods and ohhhs and ahhhs at the mention of Aunt Viv]; and has been on scholarship since kindergarten. And I have to say [insert stiff chuckle by Dr. Pearson], Josie does more than her fair share to earn her keep and represent Fairchild well. She’s an honor’s scholar, a track and field phenom, and a breathtaking beauty. If only all our diversity efforts could be this successful, right?”
More than one audience member would dab a tear from the corner of their eye. Poor people of color who triumph among the privileged always make white folks cry. It’s fund-raising 101—a recipe, I learned quickly, guaranteed to work:
Take one youth
Add at least half black or Latino or Native American or Asian (minus Chinese or Japanese)
Stir in a tale of struggle and perseverance
Bake the sob story for at least ten minutes
Et voilà! Tears and money flow.
If a donor went to four leadership functions in one year, they would see me twice. It was either Diego Rolando, swarthy Bolivian and future professional soccer stud, or me. The two other graduating students of color were either busted, shy, or on academic probation. By the nineties, working alongside or befriending a gay person may have become the norm in San Francisco thanks to Harvey Milk, but diversity efforts in private schools were still being hotly debated behind closed doors (We don’t want to water down the rigor and reputation of our school, do we? How many of these people are we talking about? Can they really keep up with the academics? I guess it’s okay as long as they don’t take my Jameson’s spot). What the board of trustees didn’t realize was that this was a fair trade. The school got a killer face to rest their diversity laurels on, and I got a first-class education and entrée into the world Aunt Viv wanted for me. And maybe, in my sadder moments, I imagined this was why my mother handed me off to a sister she barely knew.
While today the occasional bitch session with girlfriends about being used as part of a dog and pony show to raise money rears its ugly head, at the time I simply loved to be loved by the Fairchild community. My aunt Viv always told me, “Do what you gotta do, to get where you wanna get.” She was strident in her determination that I use the strength of my mind to get ahead; never choosing to dishonor my body or my soul. And I wanted to get myself to New York City. Granted, at seventeen, I had no idea why. I guess I felt like I had never quite belonged anywhere, and New York seemed like the perfect place for people who felt like they were from nowhere but wanted to find somewhere to call their own.
So the story goes, my people are Creole, the result of a lonely French dude gettin’ it on with a spicy young house girl. Unknown to the horny Frenchman, in Louisiana sleeping with black women was a bit of a social faux pas, so he hopped the next ship back to the homeland, but not without planting his Brie cheese in my great- great-grandmother.
“I had already helped raise my siblings, no reason to stay in New Orleans, where I would probably end up raising somebody else’s children for a living,” Aunt Viv would say when I asked why she left Louisiana for California the day after she graduated from high school. “Really the only thing in Louisiana is swamp, sweat, and sadness, and that’s God’s truth. But I didn’t want it to be my truth. I was the oldest of six kids, I wanted my own life.” When Hurricane Katrina hit, Aunt Viv muttered this same mantra for months, “See, I told you—just swamp, sweat, and sadness down there. You bettah be happy your mama dropped you off on my doorstep when she did.”
I was a baby in a basket, a modern-day female Moses floating down the Mississippi River. Only I was four and my riverboat was a Greyhound bus from New Orleans to San Francisco. My mama told me we were going on a trip to visit her oldest sister, Vivian, whom I’d never met, but by the time I was four the stories of Aunt Viv had reached epic proportions in my people’s part of New Orleans. She was nearing thirty and had escaped booze, boys, and babies. In the promised land of California, she slept alone in her own bed, lived alone in her own apartment, and worked in a castle. She also never returned home to the Ninth Ward, not even for Christmas or Mardi Gras.
When Dr. Pearson used to say I was a breathtaking beauty, he had never met my mother, or at least what a four-year-old mind wants to remember of her mother. Her body could stop a Fat Tuesday celebration and her hair made Diana Ross’s wigs look limp, but what I remember most was how she could lose herself in music. That woman was twenty years ahead of the twerking curve and her body defied what most thought was anatomically possible. She would sashay down a street, holding my hand; her booty swaying to a constant beat that drummed in her head. I gathered, even at the young age of four, that it was her booty that paid our bills. So at twenty-two, when my mother had saved up her dancing tips for a full year (“stripping” was not yet in my young vocabulary), we headed west to pay Aunt Viv a visit.