“Okay,” I say, eventually, wanting deeply to stroke his face, his curls, but knowing he would recoil. “Just… I’m here. If you want to talk.”
“Okay,” he says. “Can you close the door on your way out?” And then he returns to Minecraft.
Sometimes I think I’ve given my children the ultimate gift by unburdening them of race. I’ve cultivated vessels that could move in and out of crowds, undetectable as offensive. Unidentifiable. Unassuming. An invisibility cloak of sorts. What a triumph! And other times, I am hit with the painful reality that I’ve robbed them of something special. That I’ve stolen their birthright. Their identity. That no tribe would look at them and claim them as their own. Maybe not even the “mix-up/mix-up” Jamaicans. Maybe not even them.
On Tuesday night, after they’ve called the election results, my mother telephones from Florida.
“I think you and François are going to need a bigger apartment.”
“So you and Daddy can have your own room?”
“Exactly.”
“Tell CeCe we’re not going anywhere,” my father yells in the background. “We’re American now. Nothing and no one’s going to force us out.”
That Friday, at the end of a sobering week, Anouk turns forty. We talked about ringing in the new decade somewhere memorable: Tahiti or the Maldives. But any plans were forgotten when we fell apart. And I have to settle with being forwarded directly to voicemail. Knowing a response will not be forthcoming.
On Sunday, I head to the Jamaican grocery on Crenshaw, a good forty-five-minute drive from home. I pick up some saltfish and ackee to cook for the family later, and half a dozen fresh patties. And on the way back to the Westside, the car smelling of buttery pastry and spicedbeef, I switch on NPR and subject myself to more postelection commentary. A nation in shock.
OnThis American Life, they are interviewing a Black British woman. The mother of one of the show’s producers who is living in the Midwest, where she and her husband raised their children. She is sharing a recent experience she had with her daughter in a supermarket parking lot, where she was threatened by a white man over her driving skills. The event had left her shaken.
“It used to be a regular nightmare of mine was, you know, one of you children being shot dead. Why live here if you don’t have to? If you have options to be elsewhere, why choose here?… And quite honestly, you know it’s just, I’ve lived my whole life being symbolic Black and I’m quite happy to do that, but I really, I suppose, I don’t feel valued enough by this society to do what it takes to live here and to struggle and to try to make the difference in order to make this place better.”
The feeling comes over me sharply. Like the first minutes of an IV drip. Ice in my veins. The chill going straight to the bone. The freeway becomes blurry then, pointillist, like a Seurat. Like Kusama’sInfinity Nets. I move to turn on the windshield wipers and realize it is not raining. Of course not. It never rains here. My tears are what’s fogging my vision.
I pull off at the next exit. And somewhere on Sepulveda Boulevard, northbound, I let go. All that I’ve been keeping bottled up. My feelings about Anouk and François and Leelou and Lucie quitting ballet and Julien not being good enough for Ava’s parents and Los Angeles and America. Uncertainty and guilt and privilege and fear and loss.
What on earth was I doing here? A place, a life, where I might never fit in. Where something in my soul did not sit well. What was it James Baldwin had said? “To be a negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a state of rage almost all the time.”
On the radio, the British mum continues to advise her journalist son. Her melodic lilt sweet and resonant. “Don’t worry about thiscountry,” she says. “As they say, a country gets the government it deserves. So, you know, good luck to them with it.”
It stings. And yet I can’t help but think that perhaps she is right. And that living here in this skin was exhausting enough, but returning after time away was even more so. That the burdens of my skinfolk that I had fled had once again become mine. Except they were heavier. Because after twenty years without, I’d grown out of the habit of carrying them.
XLIII.ON BEAUTY.
LOS ANGELES.
NOVEMBER. 2016.
It takes two weeks to installOn Beauty. The changing over of the space, creating the black box, complete with five staggered double-layered cloth screens of varying widths suspended from ceiling to floor. The accompanying five projectors and four speakers. And in the anteroom, the installation of twenty-eight pieces (two of each subject): the black and whites that I have destroyed and then mounted in clean, uniform frames.
I spend the final week overseeing every aspect of the installation with Keely and her team. And working tirelessly with Kevin, the A/V specialist, to make certain there are no glitches in the womb installation. The 173 photos that will cycle through methodically on the scrims, and the corresponding audio. A seventeen-minute recording of chosen sound bites from my fourteen subjects that are assembled to occasionally overlay, mounting in intensity, and then waning, before mounting again. Some phrases repeated, three times, like rising triplets. Themes changing, repeating, complementing. A nod to Schubert’s “Quintet.” The audio set on a different timer than the visuals so that the delivery of sound and image never overlap in the same way twice. The result being that each viewer, while walking among the scrims of larger-than-life portraiture, has a slightly differentexperience. Living, breathing, moving through art. Consuming, while being consumed.
If Los Angeles is good at one thing, it’s making every opening feel like a special event. There are multiple photographers on site for theOn Beautyfete. Whether they are flocking to get a glimpse of Cressida or there for the art, I can’t be certain, but it feels glamorous. Art-world types and collectors and Fran’s Hollywood crew. My guests include my reps from Cherry and Martin, Jane and Sylvie, who have flown in from New York last minute to surprise me, my husband, my kids, Cressida, Hayden, Minnie, Kennedy, Brooke, Anthony, and his wife, Kim. The space fills quickly. The champagne flows. And I do my best to breathe through the moment. To get my anxiety in check. To locate myself in my body. In my vintage Halston wrap maxi dress in arresting marigold. A modest cut in a daring color.
“You look like a 1930s Hollywood starlet,” Lucie said to me earlier, as we were leaving the house.
“That’s a very specific reference. Is it the dress?”
“The dress, the red lips, the hair.”
A few days earlier, I’d cut it drastically to just above my shoulders, a length I hadn’t worn since high school. A reinvention of sorts. And a conscious choice to separate myself from every other long-haired Westside mom. A desire to assert my individuality. To exist outside of the tribe.
Among all the art world types at the Hammer that evening are the two female gallerists I met with in New York all those months ago. The ones who canceled my appointment the morning of the accident and whom I’d ultimately turned down to go with Cherry and Martin. How long ago that seems. How distant. I’d sent an invitation to their gallery as a formality, but when I spot them poring over the pieces in the anteroom, I’m pleasantly surprised. They are complimentary andgracious. And I think, not for the first time, if I’d not been hit that morning on Montana, how different everything might be. I might have not been nursing a wounded heart.
A huge part of me hopes that Anouk will show up, unannounced. That she will come breezing in, in some clingy, sexy dress and her intoxicating perfume. That she will swill champagne and laugh loudly and bask in the attention of all eyes on her. That she will casually greet me hello before a crowd of onlookers, but later, under the cover of darkness, she will rub up against me in the womb room and whisper something deliciously inappropriate in my ear.
I am still blushing at the thought when I spot him. There, on the far side of the room. The last person I expect to see.
