“?‘You’ll need an outfit for the interview,’ my mother said, even though I didn’t. When I went back to clean out the house after her death five years ago, I donated so many unworn pieces to that same women’s shelter that a volunteer asked me if I had a clothing store that had gone out of business. But my mother insisted that I take my winnings and go to the Short Hills Mall two weeks before the meeting. ‘So there’s time to get to the tailor if we need to.’ My mother loved the tailor. At five-foot-one and ninety-seven pounds, she needed his step stool more than I ever did. I had twenty-five pounds and half a head on her by the time I could drive. People didn’t know what to make of the two of us. This frail, glamorous white woman approaching her seventies and the young black girl dressed in her likeness. Was I her elderly aide? Her expensively turned-out housecleaner? I grew up stared at. Sometimes I wonder if it’s the reason I feel comfortable buying tampons with a camera crew in tow.”
The joke elicits a few laughs from the audience gathered to hear me read from my memoir at the Harold Washington Library Center in Chicago. No, I realize, my eyes settling on a woman in the third row. Not a laugh. A yawn.
“I asked my best friends to accompany me to Nordstrom,” I continue, speaking over the voice inside my head that insists I am boring everyone. Get to the good part already. “As always, Ashley, Jenna, and Caitlin went best of three on a game of rock, paper, scissors to decide who got to drive my car to the mall that day. I hated my blue bimmer. I felt screamingly self-conscious behind the wheel, ever since the night a middle-aged white man saw me searching for my keys in the parking lot of Kings and called out, ‘Hey! You! What are you doing to that car?’ He probably had a daughter my age, but to him, I wasn’t anybody’s daughter, a promising young woman with the fifth-highest GPA in her class, a nationally ranked field hockey player, or a talent on the page. I was an anonymous, suspicious, and potentially threatening you. The word still makes me shrivel in shame. I tried to imagine any of my friends being addressed as such and could not. I saw the way grown-ups looked at them—with fondness, with amusement. Oh, let them eat candy for breakfast now. Let them break curfew. Real life will come for them soon enough. Some people got mulligans in life, but I learned early on I was not to be one of them.
“In the contemporary designers department of Nordstrom, my friends flung pantsuits and skirt suits and twinsets over the top of the dressing room door. ‘Come out! Come out!’ they chanted like little kids for their dinners, rotating their thumbs down or up, depending. ‘I miss my tan,’ Caitlin sighed wistfully when I emerged in a white turtleneck and short schoolgirl kilt that Jenna liked so much she went in search of her size and tried it on too. If there is such a thing as teacher’s pet among a group of friends, then that was what I was. I was never going to call the shots, take the quarterback with the biceps to prom, or inspire copycats to steal my hairstyle. I was not a threat to my friends and that’s why I never had to worry about falling out of favor with them. For a while I found the upside to this. No one ever ganged up on me, no one ever got three tickets to Pearl Jam and said to me, ‘Sorry, you’ll have to sit this one out,’ which is something Ashley did to Jenna once because she had instant-messaged a guy Ashley liked. If the girls could only invite one friend to their beach house, it was always me. Number two wasn’t such a bad place to sit, I reasoned. And this is the insidiousness of the world in which we live. It doesn’t just discourage little black girls from being great. It makes them grateful they are not great.
“?‘What shoes, though?’ Ashley asked after the unanimous vote in favor of a Theory pantsuit in navy. ‘Nude pumps?’ Caitlin suggested. ‘Brown boots,’ Jenna said with a sly grin. ‘We wear the same size, right?’ She did a spin in the new plaid miniskirt she was about to buy.
“We called for the salesperson, hoping she might bring us some footwear options, but she was nowhere to be found. I had been relieved that she had been rude not just to me but to all of us, which allowed me to pretend that it wasn’t so much about the color of my skin as it was about my age. No doubt she dismissed us out of hand—just a bunch of bored teenagers here to not buy anything and leave the dressing room in shambles, which my friends routinely did when we shopped together. They made fun of me for neatly clipping trousers to their hangers and folding sweaters into tidy squares. ‘Such a neat freak,’ they said, and I let them think that was what it was about.
“The shoe department was on the other side of the escalators, but still close enough that I felt comfortable leaving my purse in the dressing room. There, standing before the full-length mirror in a pair of brown boots that really were the best choice for the Theory pantsuit, I saw the security guards before they tapped me on the shoulder from behind.
“They escorted me to a leather sofa outside the restrooms. A small crowd gathered, the way it did when the in-house pianist played a selection from Phantom of the Opera, watching as I was pressured to sign a statement admitting to an attempt to leave the store wearing the Theory pantsuit without paying for it. Jenna had walked out of the dressing room in a skirt she hadn’t yet paid for, but two adult men hadn’t been called in to isolate and intimidate her. ‘She wasn’t trying to steal it!’ my friends cried in exasperation. ‘Her purse is in the dressing room!’ When the security guards threatened to call their parents, they became incensed. ‘I’ll call my parents and her mom, right now!’ Ashley shouted with a defiance that crushed me. I had that nerve—would I ever feel safe enough to use it?
“Within half an hour, my mother arrived and cleared everything up, which is shorthand for me, apologizing to the saleswoman and the security guards for the misunderstanding and her, purchasing the pantsuit. (Jenna left the kilt in the dressing room in an act of revolt—‘No way is that bitch making a commission off me,’ she got to say with her nose in the air.) Two weeks later, sitting in the meeting with Ellen Leibowitz, that pantsuit felt like wearing a porcupine’s coat inside out. The humiliating memory pricked me and pricked me, rendering me a stuttering, blushing child in front of an accomplished woman I had been dreaming about impressing for weeks. ‘Oh, no,’ my mother exhaled when we met on Lexington Avenue afterward. She could see in my face that I had blown it. And instead of going downtown to celebrate, we just went home. I remember feeling relieved that it was rush hour, that the train was so crowded that we had to split up to find seats, that for the forty-one minutes it took to get from Penn Station to Summit I got to hold myself by the elbows and cry without having to consider my mother’s feelings.
“In the weeks that followed, I didn’t sleep. I slumbered. Like a character in a Disney story under a wart-nosed witch’s spell. Even at sixteen I knew my propensity for sleep was not just a byproduct of a still-growing body and brain. I hungered for it like a meal, was addicted to it like sugar—a little bit was sometimes worse than none at all, because it only made me want more, more, more. Worse: sometimes, I heard things. Words and names, so clearly enunciated that the first few times it happened I looked over my shoulder, thinking someone had stepped into the room to speak to me. I’d seen the episode of Sally Jessy Raphael where she’d interviewed teenagers with schizophrenia, the kind that makes you hear voices. Not everyone who hears voices has schizophrenia, I later learned. But at the time, I was terrified something was wrong with me and terrified to be found out. I thought if I could just get some information about my family history, I could control whatever was happening to me. I thought I could get out ahead of it.