hereby bestow you with this Black Card. Carry it with you, as proof that you’re one of us, because . . .” He squinted and started to read from the back of the card, “This card entitles the brotha or sista who bears it to all black privileges, including but not limited to: Use of the n-word, permission to wear flip-flops and socks, extra large bottles of lotion, use of this card as a stand-in for the Big Joker in a spades game, and, most important, a healthy and vocal skepticism of white folks aka crackers aka honkies. To be renewed in five years, upon evaluation.”
He nodded reverently, then pressed the card into my outstretched palm. His voice shook when he said, “Do well, brotha. Do well. Smoke the biggest blunts, kick the illest rhymes, and even when you’re out rollin’ around on that skateboard, remember that this,” he folded my fingers over the card before taking his hand away, “is yours.”
“Thank you,” I said. “Thank you,” and held the card for a moment before standing and slipping it into my pocket. It warmed my thigh.
The light went back to normal, but my room had a new type of sparkle. The unmade bed by the window was now part of a lineage of black people’s unmade beds, the ball of colorful skateboard T-shirts on the floor by the closet were just like any black person might have. I smiled, satisfied. The world was starting to make sense.
Lucius put his arm around my shoulders and said, “Y’all havin’ mac ’n’ cheese for dinner?”
I pushed his hand off. “Nigger, we already ate. Always tryna—”
I could feel him freeze, so I turned. He squeezed the front of my hoodie into his fist. “It’s nigg-a, not nigg-er. We don’t say it like that.”
Instantly, I was thrown back to every time I was scared I’d said the wrong thing around some black people, the thing that proved I didn’t belong, that I liked rock music and didn’t go to church, that I’d missed something important by living around white people. My hand slapped my front pocket. Lucius let go of my sweatshirt and pointed at my hand. “Maybe I was too quick in giving you that card. Maybe you got more to learn. Maybe,” he narrowed his eyes, “you ain’t a real brotha.”
I stepped back, shaking my head, until paper crumpled under my butt and I was sitting on my desk.
“We’ll see,” he said. “You got it now, but you gotta maintain it.”
I was playing bass in a punk band called Paper Fire. We were popular enough in our sliver of the music scene that we could play to a basement full of people in most cities. On this night, we had a gig in Wilmington. We were rumbling down the interstate near the North Carolina border when the singer/guitarist Mason shouted, “Watcha doing up there?” from the driver’s seat.
“He’s doin’ black stuff,” Russell the drummer answered from shotgun.
I was lying in the plywood loft that stretches over our amps, drums, and guitars. I fired back a response that would have got me lynched fifty years earlier: “I’m lookin’ out the back window for white women.”
We all laughed.
We got “black stuff” from a comedy video we watched at a crash pad after a show in Pittsburgh. The comedian spotted a white man with a black woman in the crowd. In the nasal white guy voice that black comics do, he said, “This week, honey, we’re doin’ black stuff. We’re going to see that new movie with the rappers in it and we’re going to the Def Comedy Jam.”
I’d recently started soaking up black pop culture, hoping for pointers, and this joke was the first time I could confidently call bullshit on what I heard. My black father’s and white mother’s interests overlapped naturally. They didn’t have to plan individual racial fixes.
Still, when my white bandmates snickered across the couch at me, I knew I was stuck. “Doin’ black stuff” became the answer to what I was up to when I was lost in thought. I wondered if the joke reminded them I was black, or helped them deal with the fact that there was something different about me and them, but I still liked it because it confirmed my blackness.
“Well, tell us if you see any good white women,” Mason said, tapping the top of the steering wheel. “So we can protect ’em from you.”
“What would Mona say to you checking out babes?” asked Russell.
“Nothing,” I answered. “She’s not my girlfriend.”
Sigh.
“Who’s Mona?” asked Mason, flicking his eyebrows in the rearview even though he’d had a girlfriend for over a year.
“We work with Mona,” I said, hoping the subject would change. Dating a coworker usually ends with an unemployed person.
“Mona’s tight,” Russell said, and dragged on his cigarette.
I nodded, even though the guys weren’t looking my way.
“Like, other girls are tight too,” Russell said, then lowered the radio a bit. “But, you know how everyone always knows who cute girls are?” he asked.
“Sure, sure,” said Mason. Richmond’s a gossipy, small city. Dating is tricky.
“She didn’t useta hang out with someone we know. She’s no one’s ex. She isn’t even some classic girl that we’d always see working somewhere and wonder how we’d ever get to talk to her.”
“She hot?” asked Mason.
“Yes,” Russell and I said at once.
There was a pause while Mason waited for us to elaborate on our answers, and I thought about how there seemed to be a thin layer of cool water under Mona’s skin, just enough to make me want to touch it and feel still.
Then I blurted out, “But she not, like, a hot girl. She’s a cool girl. And that’s more important.”
Russell nodded and took another drag.
Mason shrugged.
Mona came up to my shoulder, and I could see where her shiny round dreadlocks escaped into her bandana. She drove a dusty Saturn, wore faded jeans, and kept skittery folk CDs in rotation at our coffee-shop job. In other words, Mona was a black hippie. I wish I knew more black hippies, because they set me at ease. They’re basically a combination of my folks.
She started after this other hippie, who went by Nesta even though his paychecks said Ethan, quit to work at the new Ben & Jerry’s ice cream place, which he called “B&G’s.” She was friendly to the awkward dudes who came in with their laptops, and the tips were higher, so I didn’t mind that I’d always wind up mopping when we worked together.
Our first shift together, Mona stood about two inches closer than expected when I was showing her
