Dannie

That summer we moved from the condo with the jungle wallpaper, to the house with ivy climbing its walls. At our new house, I found my best friend the first day. Cheryl’s house is two-doors down and it was the pale green color of mint. I think a short sentence simply naming Cheryl would be a good transition between finding my best friend and seeing her pale green mint of a house. Cheryl and her sisters ruled the block, and felt it was their job to look at the new girl in the corner house with the big oak trees. They road their skateboards over and over, up and down the sidewalk, in front of our house, to establish that they owned the concrete.
I stepped out from behind the lilac bush and collided with Cheryl. We lay on the sidewalk staring at each other. She had an overbite and dusty bare feet. She wore her Catholic school uniform on Saturday, and there was a sticky ring of something red around her mouth. She looked away and asked, “Why are your mom and dad white and you’re not?”

In my life, I have only ever been asked one question.

I was five when they got married, and I got my own ring and a new yellow dress. Bob asked me if he could be my dad. Bob has a big brown beard-- his bright white balding head was sun burned bright red in the summer. The day after my mom married my new dad they drove me all the way to Curtis’ house in Milwaukee. On his front porch, my new dad and Curtis shook hands. Curtis was my father, the biological kind. And this would be our last visit.

Curtis took me to his mother’s house, and I stayed there for many days. I remember my grandma braiding my hair in cornrows. I sat on the floor, hot in between her knees, crying because of the pulling. She wacked me for being tender headed. Later, thinking I looked like my aunties, I stared in a mirror tilting my head from side to side, to examine the lighter white skin between braids. Dannie. Dannie was my name at grandma's house. Erin was some white girl’s name.

She had big hands and a wide chest. Grandma had this amazing smile, warm and mischievous. Rather than looking like her, each of her nine children reflected their own father’s features-- the only consistent feature was that smile. I have it too.

Curtis’ father, Alvin was just one in a long line of men. Curtis learned early, the language to explain his own multiple fathers, absent fathers. His own temporary fathers. When Curtis left our new family alone, I imagine that he used those words: multiple, absent, temporary. When he did not go the last custody court hearing, his absence screamed.
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My new dad chose me and asked me if he could be my dad. Before the wedding, we moved into his condo off Grand Avenue. Its walls covered with huge green leaf wallpaper—it felt like the jungle. The smell of freshly made waffle cones filled the apartment, wafting up from the Grand Ol’ Creamery down the street. The woman upstairs had a dentist chair in her apartment and she let me sit in the chair whenever I visited. A few days before we moved out, Mom spanked me for drawing on the wall with a crayola from the 96 pack that I got for a wedding present.

After the wedding, Curtis was always there in the background. My blackness forcing me to explain that when I said “father,” I meant someone else, I meant my new dad, or my stepdad or my white dad or the dad I live with, because my father was dead.

He was catatonic. He was frozen in 1985-- forever.

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On my eighth birthday, a little gold watch with a pink face came in the mail with a Milwaukee postmark. It was broken when it arrived.

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On the Christmas of my nineteenth year, my maternal grandmother hobbled down the driveway, over the ice, in the dark, to give me the message it took Curtis fifteen years to write, “I have not been doing well, lots of heart problems. I miss you very much. Please write me.” Three sentences folded inside of a Christmas card with a cartoon Santa on the front.

An avalanche came tumbling out. My mother would not stop talking. She was only 22 when she met him: “He was good to us until the drugs, and even after the drugs, he loved you.” And she rambled on and on for days. That year, winter break from my college classes, was an exercise in hiding from her nervousness.

I did not write him back.

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Curtis was a big man, almost seven feet tall and hundreds of pounds. With dark skin and his hair in jheri curls--he was not heavy, just big. There are pictures from an early Christmas that mark the striking difference between his height and hers. Mom says he had to duck in doorways. He had a big car, wide and long, and he would drive with his knees, stretching one long arm over the back of the front seat. The car filled with the smell of cologne, free from the trap of his underarm. He drove to a park, and he put me on his shoulders. I could touch the sky.

When I look at pictures of them from that time, all I see is my mom. She looks so beautiful in those pictures, young and smiley, her long brown hair curly. Her olive skin is light against his. She is always on her toes in the pictures of them together.

I am not a Movement Child-- a blessed symbol of racial progress and an inspiration of a raceless future. I am a Disco Child. I was not born in the sixties, to activist parents but at the end of the seventies, to a disco club bouncer and a cocktail waitress. Theirs was not a political statement or a statement about unity and peace, celebrated in the most intimate way. I am not a movement child unless you are talking about the shake or the electric slide. I am a disco child, born to a soundtrack of Sly and the Family Stone and of the Fifth Dimension. Their split seemed inevitable, their love looked different in the daylight. Party drugs got him, speed and cocaine set his rhythm. The music they made was off beat.