“So I asked him why. It didn’t make any sense to me. I mean, I’ve been to Greece with his family. And he said, ‘No offense, but my parents would not be cool with my sister dating a Black guy.’ Like it’s okay to have a Black friend who comes on family vacations but it’s not okay for that friend to get involved with your daughter.”
I have worked so hard to keep Edison from feeling this line being drawn, it never occurred to me that when it happened—which, I guess, was inevitable—it would burn even more, because he had never seen it coming.
I reach for my son’s hand and squeeze it. “You and Whitney would not be the first couple to find yourselves on opposite sides of a mountain,” I say. “Romeo and Juliet, Anna Karenina and Vronsky. Maria and Tony. Jack and Rose.”
Edison looks at me in horror. “You do realize that in every example you just gave me, at least one of them dies?”
“What I’m trying to say is that if Whitney sees how special you are, she’ll want to be with you. And if she doesn’t, she’s not worth the fight.”
I put my arm around his shoulders; Edison leans into me. “That doesn’t make it suck any less.”
“Language,” I say automatically. “And no, it doesn’t.”
Not for the first time, I wish Wesley were still alive. I wish he hadn’t gone back on that second tour of duty in Afghanistan; I wish that he hadn’t been driving in the convoy when the IED exploded; I wish that he had gotten to know Edison not just as a child but as a teen and now a young man. I wish he were here to tell his son that when a girl makes your blood rush it’s just the first time of many.
I wish he were here, period.
If only you could see what we made, I think silently. He’s the best of both of us.
“Whatever happened to Tommy ?” I ask abruptly.
“Tommy Phipps?” Edison frowns. “I think he got busted for dealing heroin behind the school last year. He’s in juvie.”
“Do you remember in nursery school, when that little delinquent said you looked like burnt toast?”
A slow smile stretches across Edison’s face. “Yeah.”
It was the first time a child had mentioned to Edison that he was different from everyone else in his class—and had done so in a way that also made it seem bad. Burnt. Charred. Ruined.
Before that maybe Edison had noticed, maybe he hadn’t. But that was the first time I had the Talk with my son about skin color.
“You remember what I told you?”
“That my skin was brown because I had more melanin than anyone else in the school.”
“Right. Because everyone knows it’s better to have more of something than less. And melanin protects your skin from damage from the sun, and helps make your eyesight better, and Tommy Phipps would always be lacking. So actually, you were the lucky one.”
Slowly, like water on parched pavement, the smile evaporates from Edison’s face. “I don’t feel so lucky now,” he says.
—
AS LITTLE GIRLS, my older sister and I looked nothing alike. Rachel was the color of fresh-brewed coffee, just like Mama. Me, I was poured from the same pot, but with so much milk added, you couldn’t even taste the flavor anymore.
The fact that I was lighter got me privileges I didn’t understand, privileges that drove Rachel crazy. Tellers at banks gave me lollipops, and then, as an afterthought, offered one to my sister. Teachers called me the pretty Brooks sister, the good Brooks sister. During class portraits, I would be moved up to the front row; Rachel got hidden in the back.
Rachel told me that my real father was white. That I wasn’t really part of our family. Then, Rachel and I got into it one day and started yelling at each other and I said something about going to live with my real daddy. That night my mama sat me down and showed me pictures of my father, who was also Rachel’s father—a man with light brown skin like mine—holding me as a newborn. The date on the photo was a full year before he left all three of us for good.
Rachel and I grew up as different as two sisters could be. I’m short, and she’s tall as a queen. I was an avid student; she was naturally smarter than I was, but hated school. She embraced what she referred to as her “ethnic roots” in her twenties, legally changed her name to Adisa, and started wearing her hair in its natural kinky state. Although a lot of ethnic names are Swahili, Adisa comes from the Yoruba language, which she’ll tell you is West African—“where our ancestors actually came from when they were brought here as slaves.” It means, One who is clear. See, even her name judges the rest of us for not knowing the truths that she does.
Now, Adisa lives near the train tracks in New Haven in a neighborhood where drug deals go down in broad daylight and young men shoot at each other throughout the night; she has five kids, and she and the father of her children have minimum-wage jobs and barely scrape by. I love my sister to death, but I don’t understand the choices she’s made any more than she can understand mine.
I’ve wondered, you know. If my drive to become a nurse, to want more, to achieve more for Edison all came from the fact that even between two little Black sisters, I had a head start. I’ve wondered if the reason Rachel turned herself into Adisa was because feeding that fire inside herself was exactly what she needed to believe she had a chance to catch up.