Dalton Conley
Honky
Dalton Conley
Chapter One: Black Babies
As my mother tells it, the week before I kidnapped the black baby I broke
free from her in the supermarket, ran to the back of the last aisle, and
grabbed the manager's microphone. "I want a baby sister," I announced, my
almost-three-year-old voice reverberating off ceiling-high stacks of canned
Goya beans.
"I want a baby sister," I repeated, evidently intrigued by the fact that my
own voice seemed to be coming from everywhere. Soon my mother's shopping
cart was rattling across the floor of the refrigerated back row where all
the meats were kept. I can envision the two long braids on either side of
her head flapping maniacally, as if they were wings trying to lift her and
the cart off the ground. She was, in fact, pregnant. She had explained to
me what this meant a week earlier, and I had become fixated on it, asking
each day how much longer it would be. My parents tolerated this first of my
many obsessions, happy that at least I was not resentful and jealous,
though they wondered why I so much wanted the baby to be a girl and not
another something like myself.
"How old will I be when the baby's born?" I asked one day. The next morning
I continued my questioning: "When I'm five, how old will the baby be?" Soon
after that I started to worry about its sex: "When will we know it's a
sister and not a brother?" Skin color never entered my line of
questioning.
My parents did their best to engage my curiosity, each in their own way.
While my father, Steve, used colored pens to handicap the
Racing
Form, he gave me some markers and told me to draw a picture of the
baby. I rushed through this endeavor using only the black marker and
produced something that looked like his sweat-smeared copy of the
Form after a long day at the racetrack. Steve, a painter, had just
gotten into a black-and-white phase himself and was touched by my colorless
effort; he pinned it up on the wall above the dining room table, where it
hung for years.
In contrast to my father, with his visual orientation, my mother, a writer,
took a verbal approach. She instructed me to think of an adjective for each
letter of the alphabet to describe how I would like my younger sibling to
be. We only got through "a-door-bell," my word for
adorable, and
then to
brown before I got exasperated and insisted that she tell me
what the baby would be like--as if she knew and was holding out on me.
Finally, I could stand the wait no longer. About a week after the
supermarket incident, I swiped a baby myself. While playing in our housing
project's courtyard, I found an unattended stroller. In it was a toddler
just a few months younger than me, with cornrows braided so tightly on her
little head that they pulled the skin on her face tautly upward. I remember
that she was smiling up at me, and I must have taken this as permission. I
reached up to grab the handles of the carriage, pushed it across the shards
of broken green and brown malt liquor bottles that littered the concrete,
and proudly delivered it to my mother, who was sitting on a bench with a
neighbor.
"I found my baby sister," I declared, jamming the stroller into her shin
for emphasis.
"No you haven't," my mother replied, putting her hand over her open mouth.
She turned to her neighbor on the splintered green bench. "Do you know
where her mother is?"
The child's parents--leaders of the neighborhood black separatist
organization--lived in our building, on our very floor. By now the baby was
crying, and I was jumping up and down with excitement, laughing with
delight at my success. But my laughter soon dissolved into tears, for my
mother immediately seized the plastic handles of the stroller and returned
it from where it came. She made a beeline across the concrete, over the
black rubber tiles of the kiddie area and under the jungle gym, all the way
to the other side of the playground, where a woman was pacing frantically
back and forth, her Muslim head scarf flowing out behind her like a proud national flag. When my mother finally reached the woman she apologized repeatedly
, explaining that she could certainly empathize with the experience, since
I escaped from her sight several times a week. The woman said nothing, her
silent glare through narrowed eyes a powerful statement in itself, while
the baby and I went on screaming and crying a cacophonous chorus.
After the kidnapping, the separatist mother did not speak to us for a
month, as if we had confirmed her worst suspicions about white people.
Then, just as the springtime buds were starting to blossom, she talked to
my mother in the elevator. "April is the cruelest month," she said, as if
T.S. Eliot were code for something. Whenever my mother would tell this part
of the story, her voice would soften and trail off. Only later did I figure
out that she remembered it so vividly out of a sense of liberal, racial
guilt--guilt over her surprise at hearing a black separatist recite English
poetry.
"Yes, it is," my mother responded, wracking her brain as she tried to
remember which poet had said that. She thought maybe it was Ezra Pound, the
Nazi sympathizer, and that the woman was making a veiled expression of
anti-Semitism. Then she quoted the poem back to the woman: "Winter kept us
warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow..."
The woman didn't say anything else, continuing to stare at the numbers as
they descended from twenty-one; she got off the elevator at the ground
floor and smiled at my mother. At this point in the telling, my mother's
voice would rise with the satisfaction that she and the woman had shared a
moment, a literary bond. But later that night, well after midnight, the
woman, her husband, and my ersatz baby sister were dragging, wheeling, and
pushing all of their belongings across the hallway to the elevator in a
caravan of suitcases, each one overstuffed and bulging, as pregnant with
mystery as my mother was with my imminent sibling. The woman was screaming
at her husband to hurry up, so loudly that she woke up several families.
Parents poked their heads out of steel doorways, blinking as they peered
into the fluorescent hallway. Finally my mother asked the woman to keep it
down, since we were trying to sleep. I imagine that she asked sheepishly,
cowed by her chronic white guilt.
"Noise?" the woman yelled back as she pushed a shopping cart full of
overstuffed manila folders down the corridor. Her eyes were as wide with
adrenaline as they had been narrowed with seething rage the month before.
"The noise is your kid's Big Wheel going up and down, up and down the
hallway all day. Don't tell
me about noise." Despite her reaction,
the din soon ebbed, and all that was left of the separatists was a quite
literal paper trail that led back to their apartment, whose glossy,
brown-painted door stood ajar. I don't need my mother's storytelling to
recall the open door. An open door in that neighborhood was something
strange and unusual. It usually meant something was seriously amiss--that a
woman was fleeing an abusive husband, that a robbery or even a murder had
taken place. For me, the open door came to have the same association with
death that a hat on a bed does for many people.
Insomniac that she was, my mother stayed up and waited eagerly for the
sound of the newspaper dropping outside our door. She savored her morning
ritual, in which she brewed dark-roast Bustello-brand Puerto Rican coffee
to accompany the
Daily News. That morning my mother read in the
paper that the separatist group had taken credit for a bomb planted at the
Statue of Liberty the day before. The bomb had been defused, but it still
caused a panic among the tourists. Just as she was reading that the FBI was
searching for the members of the separatist group, the racket in the
hallway started up again. She peeked out, and there, as if arriving on cue,
were the investigators from the FBI, identified by the large yellow letters
on the backs of their nylon jackets. Within an hour they, too, had cleared
out, padlocking the family's door and pasting layer upon layer of tape over
it, yellow strips with black writing that formed negatives of the jackets
they had worn. The tape read CRIME SCENE, DO NOT ENTER--as if we had a
choice. I was fascinated with this tape and peeled it off strip by strip
when I played in the hallway. My mother saved some for my room, guessing
correctly that I would like it after a few years, when I understood what it
meant. A couple of months later the padlock and tape came down, and a few
weeks after that a Chinese family moved in. We never saw the FBI again, and
the FBI never saw the separatists.
In retrospect, my baby-seizing mistake was understandable. The idea that a
brown-skinned baby couldn't come from two ashen parents wouldn't have
entered the mind of a two-and-a-half-year-old. After all, a young child has
not yet learned the determinants of skin color, much less the fact that in
America families are for the most part organized by skin color. Moreover,
in the projects people seemed to come in all colors, shapes, and sizes, and
I was not yet aware which were the important ones that divided up the
world. At that age, the fact that my parents were much bigger than me was
of much greater consequence that the fact that most of the other kids my
size had darker skin.
I even felt culturally more similar to my darker-hued peers than to the
previous generations of my own family. For one, I didn't talk like my
parents, who had migrated to New York from Pennsylvania and Connecticut. I
spoke like the other kids in the neighborhood. On the playground everyone
pretty much spoke the same language with the same unique accent, no matter
where our parents came from. While adults might speak only Spanish, or talk
with a heavy drawl if they came from down South, our way of talking was
like a layered cake; it had many distinctly rich flavors, but in our mouths
they all got mixed up together. When we "snapped" on each other, little did
we know we were using the same ironic lilt and intonation once employed in
the Jewish shtetls of Central Europe. This Yiddish-like English had mixed
with influences from southern Italians, Irish, and other immigrant groups
to form the basic New Yorkese of the mid-twentieth century. We spoke with
open vowels and dropped our
rs:
quarter was
quartah,
and
water was
watah. To this European stew we added the
Southern tendency to cut off the endings of some words--
runnin',
skippin', jumpin'--a habit that came northward with many blacks during
the Great Migration. We also turned our
ts into
ds, as in
"Lemme get
fiddy cents." The latest and most powerful influence was
Puerto Rican. Within the Spanish-speaking world, Puerto Ricans were
notorious for their lazy
rs, just as New Yorkers were, so the fit
was perfect. Whenever someone said
mira, the Spanish term for
look, it came out
media.
Although Spanish separated the native speakers from those of us who picked
it up on the playground, the presence of the large Puerto Rican population
had the opposite effect for me, narrowing the racial rift between others
and myself. Their various hues of tan and brown made my looks seem a matter
of degree rather than of kind, filling in the spectrum of color separating
most of the black kids from me. It helped that I was not entirely pale. My
hair was as dark as that of anyone around. If studied closely, my eyes
betrayed brown shades around the interior of the iris, fanning out to
green, but from afar they looked no lighter than those of a lot of the
kids. My skin tone ranged from white to brownish depending on the time of
year. For all these reasons, I perceived skin color in particular and race
in general as something mutable, something that could change with the
seasons or with an extended trip back to Puerto Rico. In this I was no
different from scholars two centuries earlier who described "blackness" as
a universal freckle that would fade with time spent in the North or darken
over the course of generations in Africa.
While I may have been oblivious to race as a toddler, I certainly
recognized gender differences. More than anything else, I prayed for the
baby to be a girl. As it turned out, I got my wish.
