Their mother was sanguine about Sisi’s transformation. “Osei, your sister is growing up,” she soothed her son. “She does not want to have her little brother around her now. But you know that she still loves you. It will be easier for her to show it when she is older. You must be patient with her and she will come back.”
Their second year in New York, when she turned fifteen, Sisi mutated into someone even more distant, to the point where he had to remind himself she was his sister. First she began dropping white friends she had in school, which left her with no friends at all since her school was all white. Then she began hanging out with black kids she’d met somewhere, and adopted an American accent sprinkled with slang. “Solid,” she began to say. “Your mama,” she said to insult someone. The day she referred to white people as “honkies”—though not in front of their parents—Osei knew their paths had truly diverged.
This angry black girl performance only lasted a month or two before segueing into something more sophisticated, and equally baffling to Osei. Dropping the American slang, she stepped up the singsong Ghanaian accent she and Osei had had as small children. She began wearing bright tunics made of kente cloth—to her mother’s delight. Mrs. Kokote wasn’t so pleased, however, when Sisi grew her hair out into an Afro so long it bowed under its own weight. When she chided her daughter, Sisi laughed and put an arm around her mother. “But Maame, you should be pleased that I am letting my hair go natural, the way God intended African hair to be.”
She began to go out more after school and on weekends. Osei eavesdropped outside her door and learned she was lying to her parents about where she was and whom she was with. One day he secretly followed her to Central Park, where she sat with a group of other young black teenagers he didn’t recognize. They were dressed similarly to Sisi, in dashikis or other tops made of kente cloth, and had big Afros. From a distance he could not hear what they were saying, but could guess from the phone calls he had listened in on: they were American but would have neo-African names they’d taken on like Wakuna, Malaika, or Ashanti, and they would sprinkle their conversation with references to Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey, the Black Panthers, slogans like Black Power and Black Is Beautiful, and terms he didn’t understand like “white supremacy,” “pan-Africanism,” and “internalized racism.” Osei watched Sisi raise her fist in the black power salute whenever anyone arrived or left—a gesture he recognized from the poster she had put up in her room of the athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos raising their fists at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico. It made him uneasy. She was fifteen years old; wasn’t that too young to become a radical? He missed their earlier ease with each other, when they used to play gin rummy or try to learn dances from Soul Train. He even missed her sullen teenage silence. He didn’t want to hear her talking about the oppressor and the oppressed.
O snuck away from Central Park that day without revealing himself. He did not say anything to Sisi later. Nor did he tell his parents what their daughter was doing. The Kokotes seemed blissfully unaware of Sisi’s new activities.
On the other hand, just before they left for Washington, his mother made him get a haircut, so that he lost his own big Afro. He’d been proud of it, carrying a pick in his back pocket everywhere he went, to comb his bush and keep it even and tidy. Osei did not normally fight with his parents, but he argued hard against getting a haircut. “Why?” he kept asking.
“There is too much emphasis on hair in this household,” his mother insisted obliquely. “It is better for a fresh start.”
When O continued to complain, his father cut in. “Son, you will do what your mother asks, and you will not question her judgment. She knows what she is talking about.”
That was the end of the argument and the Afro. “Sorry, little brother,” Sisi said when she saw him post-cut. She chuckled. “You look like a sheep when it has been shorn!”
He noticed her own Afro was still intact.
Now as Osei entered the classroom alongside Dee, his new teacher had another student move so that they could sit together at a cluster of desks, which were grouped in fours, facing each other so they made rectangles. This was clearly an unusual decision, as O could hear murmurs ripple through the classroom until the teacher cleared his throat and all went quiet.
“Do you have pencils and pens and a ruler and eraser?” he demanded of his new student.
Osei froze, not wanting to pull out the strawberry case, for he could predict the teasing that would follow, but he was not sure what else to do. Dee knew, though. Reaching into her desk, she drew her own case onto her lap, then slid it over into his without anyone seeing.
“Yes…”
“Mr. Brabant,” Dee whispered.
“Mr. Brabant.” O held up the case. It was white, which was not a color he would have chosen, but at least it wasn’t pink. It had Snoopy on it, the dog from the Charlie Brown comic strip, sitting on his red doghouse, hunched over a typewriter. Snoopy was all right; O preferred him to miserable Charlie Brown or bossy Lucy. Reasonable Linus would have been acceptable too, or Schroeder playing his piano. Snoopy, though, had one advantage over all of them: he did not have white skin, but black and white fur.
Across the room one of the girls—a pretty one made ugly by trying too hard with her clothes—openly gasped, clearly recognizing Dee’s case.
Mr. Brabant, however, was not the sort of teacher who would get to know every student’s pencil case. He merely nodded and began to call the roll. Dee’s last name was Benedetti. O had been right—Italian. Many of the others were the common American last names like Cooper, Brown, Smith, Taylor. But there were plenty of immigrant names as well: Fernandez, Korewski, Hansen, O’Connor. Despite the eclecticism of those names, his own name, Osei Kokote, which Mr. Brabant wrote in at the end of the roster, still stuck out.
When the teacher’s back was turned, O handed back the Snoopy case. Then he took everything out of the strawberry case. “You have it,” he whispered, and set it in her lap.
“Ohhh,” Dee breathed. “Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“Thank you!” She smiled and began transferring her pencils to the strawberry case. Then she held out the empty Snoopy to him. “Let’s trade.”
“You do not have to do that,” O whispered.
“I want to. I love it.” Dee squeezed his sister’s case and continued to hold out hers. “I want you to have mine.”
O took the Snoopy case. The girl sitting across from Dee—straight mousy-brown hair, with carefully trimmed bangs crossing her forehead, and wearing a plaid pinafore dress—was watching their transaction with fascination, unable to hide her disgust. O widened his eyes at her, and she dropped her own and reddened.