Helen Oyeyemi - Boy, Snow, Bird

I sprained my arm out here in Twelve Bridges when I was about twelve; we were ice-skating and I tried to break my fall with my hand, which is what Uncle John might call “unintelligent”… one hand against the weight of an entire body. The arm hurt for so long I began to be afraid that it would never get done hurting. Until the day Aunt Clara came and hugged me and I put both my arms up and around her without even thinking about it. The arm had healed. More important, it hadn’t come off. So I reasoned I couldn’t be a doll, and neither could you.

The one thing I’d tell you about me is that I’m a deceiver. In another draft of this letter I wrote that I wasn’t always like this, but let’s try the truth and see what it does. It’s probably been official since the night Ephraim, Laura, and I were waiting in line for drinks at a bar over in the next town. We had brand-new fake IDs in our wallets; they’d been expensive and they were convincing and we were excited. Ephraim thought the line was moving faster than it really was and he ended up stomping on someone’s heel. The guy Ephraim had bumped into was a nice guy, I think. He accepted Ephraim’s apology at first. But everybody was a little drunk and a little tired of standing in line, so maybe, just maybe, it was to pass the time that one of the guy’s friends started wondering aloud who “that nigger” thought he was, and the guy began to feel like he had to act a certain way in front of his friends — I could see him begin to feel it, saw the feeling growing on him, like a fur, only faster than anything natural can grow. He said: “Yeah…” and he called Ephraim the same name his friend had, only I think he was ashamed to say it, because he stuttered.

Ephraim said: “Cool out, man. Nothing really happened. So why use that kind of language?” He’s got a way about him, my friend Ephraim. Another guy might have sounded like a weakling, another guy might have sounded like he was backing down. But Ephraim was stepping up and giving the other guy a chance for everything to be okay. The other guy got braver once he’d called Ephraim a name, though, and he looked right at me and said that classy-looking girls should choose better friends. I was confused that he felt he could speak to me like that — I used to assume that when I’m with colored people the similarities become obvious, but I guess it’s something people don’t see unless they’re looking to see it. I felt as if I’d left my body, felt as if I were standing over on the other side of a room, watching as a big lie was being told about me. I should have told that guy that when he called anybody that name in my hearing he was saying it directly to me. I should have told him never to dare call anybody that name again. All I did was turn to Ephraim and whisper: “Ephraim, let’s go.”

Laura shook her head and called me “un-bee-leeve-able.” I was afraid that those boys would follow us out onto the street, maybe with broken bottles in their hands. I’ve heard how one thing leads to another, it’s not only in the South that an evening gets that way… but they preferred to keep their place in the line. We looked for another bar to go to, but Ephraim and Laura kept rejecting each one we came across, kept saying it’d be just like the bar we’d left. Then they said they were tired and wanted to go home. I went with them. I’m wondering if that’s all I can do for them. I can’t seem to speak up, but I can go with them, silently. That was a little more than three years ago, so I don’t think I can honestly say that it was only this year I became deceptive.

Aunt Clara thinks I transcribe interviews at a newsroom in the city. Uncle John thinks the same, and so does almost everybody else except Mouse. Mouse knows I didn’t even make it past the first day of secretarial college and so efficiently transcribing a series of interviews would actually be a little beyond me. I told Mouse because I had to tell somebody, and also because I know a couple of things about her that she doesn’t want me to tell anybody, so that makes her less likely to spill.

Bird, here’s what happened on the first day of secretarial college:

I got there half an hour early. Near the entrance I was given a clipboard and a square tag with MISS S. WHITMAN printed on it. I went up a staircase and into a sky-lighted auditorium — it was as big as an auditorium, anyhow — filled with row after row of desk-and-chair sets, each chair attached to each desk with a gray bar. There was a black typewriter set on each desktop; more typewriters and desks than I could count. Seven or eight other girls had already taken their seats, looking straight ahead of them as if they’d already begun the march into infinity. I remember feeling doubtful about the bun I’d twisted my hair into just an hour before. I patted it, and it was more or less the same as theirs, not too high, not too low. The desks at the back were designated for Adamses and Allens, so I walked and walked until I found the Walkers and Williamses. There was a blackboard at the front of the room, hung on the wall like a picture frame. I found MISS A. WHITMAN and thought, Almost there. It felt as if my legs would buckle under me from all the walking I’d done.

MISS B. WHITMAN was next. Then MISS C. WHITMAN and MISS D. WHITMAN. Immediately followed by Misses E., F., G., and H. Whitman. None of them had taken their seats yet. “Who are all these girls?” I asked aloud. “Who the hell are they?”

MISS K. WHITMAN was the last straw, she was the moment I realized the secretarial college had an alphabet’s worth of us. Mouse says I was surely hallucinating, but I know what I saw. I removed my name tag, left my clipboard on K. Whitman’s seat, and went shopping with the money I’d saved to pay for the next month’s classes. I bought lipstick and peaches and cigarettes and a ticket to a theater matinee. After the matinee I went home and was asked how college had been and I said: “It was fine.”

I left the peaches in a bowl on my bedside table, and spent the next day filling out forms at an employment agency. There was an additional cover sheet that asked you to declare your race. The woman at the front desk said that it was just for the agency records, that it wasn’t information they passed on to employers, but the girl next to me said to her: “You people need to think about what you’re doing to us. You’re bad people… you’re making us paranoid. You’re driving us crazy. Every time I don’t make it through to interviews I’ll be wondering whether it’s because there are better candidates or because of color. Color, color, color; what you’re doing is illegal and you know it. I should find myself a lawyer who’s ready to make an example of you.”

The woman at the front desk had heard it all before and she recited something about it being impossible to obtain any proof that employers were shown the information agency clients provided on the additional cover sheet. The girl who’d talked about suing the agency couldn’t make up her mind. First she crumpled the cover sheet up in her hand, then she smoothed it out again and ticked her box. I left mine blank; I knew that I was within my legal rights not to say. Ms. Front Desk pushed my forms back across the table to me and said I had to fulfill all of the requirements. I told her, “None of these options say what I am,” and she rolled her eyes. “Every day. Every day a philosopher walks in off the street and makes my job that little bit harder to do.”

Then she said: “Why won’t you say? Hmmm?” and I had to tick “colored” to show Aunt Clara I wasn’t ashamed, even though Aunt Clara wasn’t there and would never know what box I ticked. When I got home, I said college had been fine, and I counted up the remainder of my money and wolfed down the peaches. If I hid them and saved them for later, they’d only have rotted away. They were already getting too soft and my fingers sank through their flesh and closed around their stony hearts. The agency couldn’t seem to find anything for me to do and I kept back from the brink of paranoia by reminding myself that I had no experience. I sort of happened upon my real job about a week later. The details of it don’t matter, but it involves a hell of a lot more deceiving, with and without words.