Helen Oyeyemi - Boy, Snow, Bird

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when I got too big and too distracted to meet the demands of being Mrs. Fletcher’s assistant, I stayed home, ate my way through the fruit baskets Mia and Webster sent over, and listened to Julia Whitman’s voice. You’re every thought, you’re everything, you’re every song I ever sing…

I hoped Bird would sing like that, would have a voice as strong and rich as the one I listened to, with all those teasing little trips and breaks in it. It was a voice Snow didn’t seem interested in hearing anymore—“I’m almost eight years old now,” she said, as if that had anything to do with it — but maybe in time Bird could make her listen again.

A simple solution, maybe. Just like running away from home, just like staying away from Ivorydown because of the woman I’d seen there. But the thing about these simple solutions is that they work.

b ird was born in the spring. I say “was born” because the pain was so tremendous that I just let it come. It was like quicksand. The only way to make it out alive was to stop struggling against it, to submit. I’m told I was in labor for thirteen hours, but I really wouldn’t know. There was the quicksand, then there was Bird in my arms, safe and well, and dark. No. It wasn’t just her shade of gold (the closest skin could get to the color of my husband’s eyes. I think I made some dumb joke: “Look at this kid, born with a suntan—”), it was her facial features too. As the nurse said when she thought I was too wiped out to hear: “That little girl is a Negro.”

I didn’t want to show her to anybody. Not to her father, not to her sister. No one. The doctor told me that Arturo seemed like a reasonable man, that he could talk to Arturo for me if I wanted, that everything could still be okay, and I realized that he thought he was talking to an unfaithful wife. I laughed and laughed, high-pitched laughter that roused Bird to try to outdo me with her crying. The doctor thought I’d gone to bed with a colored man, and I had. He was my husband.

What did I think Arturo would do when he saw Bird at last? Whatever it was I’d prepared for, he didn’t do it. He held her, gave her Eskimo kisses, and said she was a smash hit. Snow climbed up onto the bed, did a triple take, then said: “Let’s keep her!” Arturo didn’t even try to touch me; he knew I wouldn’t let him. I looked at him over the top of Snow’s head and I mouthed: “Who are you? Who are you?”

He came back later in the afternoon, without Snow. He brought a hip flask full of apricot palinka with him (he refused to reveal its source) and we passed it back and forth, drinking in silence, not quite looking at each other. When the flask was three-quarters empty, he asked: “You drunk yet?”

Everything had become polka dots, especially him. I found this endearing… I may even have smiled. “A little.”

“Me too,” he said. “We’d better talk.”

In his mind he was no more colored than I was; he’d never even met his grandparents or cousins, his parents were the only ones from their families who’d decided to move north from Louisiana and see if anyone called them out on their ancestry. His father had stood in line behind a colored man at the front desk of the Flax Hill Country Club and eavesdropped as the colored man tried and failed to gain membership. “We’re fully subscribed,” the colored man was told. But Gerald Whitman was offered a membership form to fill out without further ado. It was too bad for the other guy, but Gerald liked golf and didn’t see why he shouldn’t play it in those surroundings if he could get away with it. Gerald had thought: Well, what if I just don’t say… what if I never say? He’d passed that down to Arturo, the idea that there was no need to ever say, that if you knew who you were then that was enough, that not saying was not the same as lying. He asked me a question that threw me into confusion because I couldn’t honestly answer yes or no. He asked if I’d have married him if I’d seen him as colored.

“And Julia?”

“Mom says as soon as she saw Joe and Agnes Miller she knew they were the same as her and Dad. You should have seen how long their faces were at the wedding — Mom’s face, Dad’s face, Agnes’s face, Joe’s. But Snow turned out to be… Snow, and we got to go on not saying.”

Snow was blameless. And Arturo was forgivable; maybe because he said that he felt that Bird was his, ours, in a way that he hadn’t felt with Snow. He said that for a long time he’d looked at Snow and seen her as Julia’s child. Snow’s beauty had seemed so strange to him for a while, so blank, like a brand-new slate. But Bird looked up at him confidingly, in a way that made him grin. “This kid is pretty sure we’re old friends.”

It was Olivia Whitman I could not forgive. When Bird and I came home, she was our first visitor, and she took one look at Bird, a cold, thorough look, then turned her gaze away. “Well, she’s healthy, thank God.” She then began to insinuate that I’d two-timed Arturo and gave me to understand I had another thing coming if I expected Arturo to raise another man’s child. I said: “You think I won’t slap you, Olivia, but I will. Keep going and you’ll see.”

Next she implied that my background was questionable. She didn’t know where I was really from, she hadn’t met my father, she’d taken everything I said on trust.

“Nice try, but I’m not going to stand here while a colored woman tries to tell me that maybe I’m the one who’s colored.”

I sat down with Bird, who wailed because she preferred me to stand. Olivia sat down too, on the same couch, but leaving a large space between us. Now that I knew about her it was incredible that I hadn’t seen it before. Or had I? Tea with her and Agnes and Vivian had made me think of Sidonie; it hadn’t just been my mind wandering.

“The last person who threatened to slap me was a white woman. Blonde, like you. No Southern belle, either. Just trash.”

“I guess that’s how we operate.”

I told myself, Stop it. Whatever else she says, don’t rise to it. I wanted a grandmother for Bird. Olivia wasn’t the one I would have chosen, but she was a generous grandmother to Snow and if she put her mind to it, she could do it again. Bird was beautiful too, with her close curls and her bottomless eyes, and she was only just getting started.

“I was working at a grocery store,” Olivia said. “And I didn’t fetch a box of soap flakes down fast enough for that woman’s liking, so she said: ‘I’ll slap you, girl.’ ‘I’ll slap you, girl’ to a grown woman. And I knew I’d lose my job if I went at her, so I just said: ‘I’m sure you’ve got a lot of things to do, ma’am, and I’m as stupid as they come. Please be patient with me.’ That was standard, that kind of cringing and crawling. I didn’t want it to be. She was not my better, I don’t care what anyone says, she wasn’t. None of them were. I thought: If I have a daughter, I don’t want anyone talking to her like that. I don’t ever want to hear my daughter wheedling at anyone the way I do every working day . I thought: If I do, if I ever hear that in the voice of a child of mine, I’ll make her sorry all right. I’ll wring her damn neck. Couldn’t very well wring my own neck, could I?”

Olivia’s voice was very calm, but her hands trembled. I backed up, moved farther away so that Bird and I were pressed against the arm of the sofa. I didn’t think she was going to lash out. No, I wanted to keep us from catching what was in her, what was there in her voice and her eyes. But babies have some unfathomable criteria for what they consider attractive. Bird was wriggling like crazy. Her intuition should’ve told her that Olivia was terrible, just the worst, but I was having trouble keeping the kid from stretching her hands out in Olivia’s direction. I don’t know, maybe she already had expensive tastes and liked the scent Olivia was wearing.