visibility and the house of cards

Recently, my father and I were driving through the town of my birth and first five years of my life, Xenia, Ohio, to purchase a certified copy of my birth certificate. As we rode past one small rural house after another, Dad pointed out a street we lived on when I was a child. “That was where the next door neighbors’ son you played outside with called you a nigger, and you came home and called your mother that.” I chucked a little as he told me how afterwards, my mother went to the neighbor’s house to confront the boy’s father about it. Of course, he apologized profusely. I imagine my mother, mid-twenties at best, skinny, articulate and black standing up to her working-class, male, white and obviously racist next door neighbor. I try to conjure her tone of voice, the expression on her face.
     It wasn’t too long after that my parents moved to Dayton, just a thirty minute drive away, and my mother decided that she wanted to rear me in a diverse neighborhood. She says she wanted to expose me to different kinds of people (which in Dayton, Ohio translates into white, if you’re black, black, if you’re white), and didn’t want me to be grow up intimidated by them. The neighborhood where I spent my grammar school years was a medium-sized condominium complex called Hamden Village. Most of the families in the
complex were white, with a handful of blacks thrown in. Eighty percent of my childhood friends were white.
     As if the neighborhood weren’t enough, it was also decided that I should be enrolled in a private, Christian elementary school, which also happened to be predominately white. I never recall being called a nigger there, and the most hell I received came from the other little black girls who attended the school. They made it their recess entertainment to play an emotional game at my expense wherein some days they played with and spoke to me, and other days they quite mysteriously would pretend as if I didn’t exist. Those five taught me the meaning of invisibility. Interestingly enough, when I decided in the fourth or fifth grade to become best friends with a little blonde girl with braces in my homeroom named Amy and began ignoring them, I suddenly became consistently visible. Just to keep the friendship confusion to a minimal, I decided to stick with Amy.
     Back on the sterile home front of Hamden Village, I spent the summers running up and down “the hill,” a paved incline that separated the top portion of the complex from the lower, to the fenced in swimming pool, and various friends’ houses. Most of my time was spent with two sisters, Kelly and Leslie, who lived with their mother, Patti and stepfather, Jim. Jim and Patti’s favorite pastime was cooking out on their closed-in patio, and sitting on lawn chairs drinking Miller High Life out of the can.
     Kelly, Leslie and I spent time between their parents’ house and my parents’ house playing elaborate games with Barbie dolls that bordered on soap opera drama. We drove our parents crazy running in and out of the screen doors of each other’s condos, asking them for various and random things – a snack, something to drink, ideas about what we could do when we were bored, a chaperone to the swimming pool – and letting the screen doors slam shut behind us when we left.
     I didn’t have a name for it then, but I knew Kelly and Leslie’s stepfather liked to drink a lot. He was a sweet enough fellow, but I was an oversensitive only child. I did what I could to avoid him most of the time. Something seemed “not right” about him. He spoke most of the time when I came by for the girls, and if he was in a particularly jovial mood he may have joked around with us sometimes, but most of the time he was just coarse and loud.
     It was the ‘70s then, and Alex Haley’s Roots aired for the first time. I only remember watching snippets of it, but I knew enough to know the names of some of the characters from overheard conversations the adults were having about it at the time. The historical, political and racial implications of that mini-series were way over my head as a child. My parents did very little “race talk” when I was coming up. We were black, most of the other people around us were white, move on. In my mind, it was a non-issue.
     One afternoon changed all that. During one of my ritual visits to Kelly and Leslie’s, I got a mini-lesson in race relations. It was one of those days when Jim was what my friends and I now call, “feeling lovely.” Full of one two many Miller High Lifes, he was social and affectionate. The context is all a blur now, as most childhood memories are apt to become, but I do remember that Jim was expressing his appreciation for me. “You know who she reminds me of, Patti?” he said, most drunken and innocently, High Life sweating in his hand. “What’s the little girl’s name on Roots? Kissy! That’s it, Kissy!” He put his arm around my 9-year-old shoulders. “That’s what I’m going to call you. Kissy.” He laughed, I laughed. What else was a 9-year-old black girl in a white household dominated by a drunken white man supposed to do?
     I walked home that evening, the sun just starting to fall, feeling disoriented and confused. My stomach hurt. I knew something really important just happened, but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what it was. I knew that whatever it was, I didn’t like it. Jim calling me Kissy made me feel small. That’s the best way I can describe it now, small, and somehow I knew that Jim’s new pet name for me conveyed a bit more than affection. After sneaking quietly back into the haven of my parents’ house, I determined the best course of action: tell Mom.
     What is to me most interesting in hindsight is that I knew telling my mother, meant telling my father, which in turn meant Jim was going to be in trouble. I knew that Jim would get into trouble, and I didn’t really want that to happen. What I wanted was to unload my uncomfortability. I wanted my mother to explain why him calling me that made me feel not quite right, like a joke had been played on me and I missed the punch line. I don’t remember my mother explaining it to me. I don’t even remember her exact response, but I do remember her telling me that she and Dad were going to have to talk to Jim. I also remember losing my marbles over the idea of that. I didn’t want confrontation. I just didn’t want him to call me Kissy. That wasn’t my name.
     My mother has jokingly said once or twice, “Two things break up a whole lot of foolishness: a big, black dog or a big, black man.” My dark skinned, 6’3 father has proven that adage quite a few times. Jim not only stopped calling me Kissy, he apologized for it the next time I got my guts up enough to visit his house. Drunk, as usual, Jim asked me to come into the living room. “I want to apologize for calling you Kissy. I really didn’t mean anything by it. I like you.”
     As much as I didn’t want to, I cried. The tears just sprung, hot from my eyes. I told him it was okay when it really wasn’t okay, when I wanted to slink back out of the house, run to my room and never have to look at or talk to him again. I hated myself for crying, I hated him for seeing me cry. I hated the fact that he saw how what he said got to me. More than being hurt, I was angry, angry at him for being ignorant, angry at my parents for scaring him into an apology, for calling him out on knocking down the race-free house-of-cards they tried to construct for me. Jim hugged me in an attempt to console me, which made me hate him even more.
     Things were tenuous between Jim and I after that. I went to visit Kelly and Leslie only when they wouldn’t come to my house or when I couldn’t find them roaming the neighborhood. He went out of his way to speak to me and be friendly when I dropped by, but I knew it was all overcompensation, though I didn’t have a name for that then either. He walked and talked light when I was around, careful not to bring on another visit from
my father.
     It took me awhile to get over it all, to stop thinking about why he said what he did and what he really meant by it, stop thinking of myself as different, more vulnerable than the white kids I played with at home and in school everyday. Eventually though, I did. I got over the shame of the tears, the embarrassment of the confrontation Jim’s “affection” brought about. Occasionally I was even able to sneak back into the house of cards where race didn’t matter, but with a realization of where I stood in the construct.