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“I’m going to lighten you up, to bring out this beautiful skin you have and loosen you up a bit,” he answered, looking at my reflection in the mirror. “You don’t worry, signora. You’re in the best hands. I do everything myself. Piero make you look like true diva. Trust me. Trust me. Trust me.” He began massaging my scalp softly.
Piero was hypnotizing me with each and every word he said. Listening to his voice, I felt like I was drifting down the Grand Canal in Venice on a gondola, or sunbathing on an Italian beach. Piero was working his magic on me. I sat back in the chair and closed my eyes, praying I’d wake up in heaven.
“Oh my God,” I said, looking at myself in the mirror when Piero had finished my hair. “Oh my God, God, God.” I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t believe I could look like that. Piero had colored my hair a deep chestnut blonde and straightened it so flat it hung to the middle of my back. I didn’t even know it was that long, I thought, inspecting it in the mirror to make sure it wasn’t a weave. I looked gorgeous. It was amazing. I knew Julian wouldn’t be able to stop looking at me, because I couldn’t stop looking at myself. I hugged Piero and kissed Grandma Lucy, who was now enjoying her third glass of champagne, on the cheek.
“You look like a billion dollars,” Grandma Lucy said. “I told you she could be a model, Piero. She could walk the runways of Paris if she wanted to.”
“Watch out, Ms. Naomi and Ms. Tyra, meet Ms. Troy Helene!” Piero jumped in.
We all laughed and did a group high five—with Ms. Pearl.
After Grandma Lucy and I left the salon, we both did a manicure and pedicure, where I chose “drop-dead red” nail polish. Sliding into the backseat of her Bentley, careful not to touch anything with our still-damp nails, we giggled like we were best friends sharing delicious secrets.
“Oh, Troy Helene, I so love spending afternoons with you,” Grandma Lucy said. “You’re so much fun for your old grandmother. You remind me of what it was like to be your age.”
“Oh, I love hanging with you too, Lucy.” I kissed her on the cheek. She really was a lot of fun.
“I just wish your mother could come with us sometimes, you know? That she was more like you. Not all stuffy and angry. I swear that child has a huge chip on her shoulder.”
“Lucy, you kno
w what that’s about,” I said, checking my nails.
“Yeah, but she can’t still be angry about all that old stuff. It’s just the way it is. The way things are.” Grandma Lucy crossed her hands over her lap and shrugged her shoulders matter-of-factly. By “old stuff,” she meant my mother’s issues with both her own and Grandma Lucy’s blackness. And by “the way it is” and “things are,” she meant the way black people like my grandmother, my mother, and I were expected to live. The “bourgeois” tendencies my mother had actually attempted to escape.
“I know, Lucy. But she just has her own issues. That’s all,” I said, not wanting to speak about anything too specifically that would offend Grandma Lucy. While she knew I knew her past of passing, we never spoke of it. I wouldn’t say it was because it was painful, it was simply tradition not to talk about it.
“I did the best I could,” Grandma Lucy said, surprising me. “The world was just so different then…things were so different. You’ll never understand the sacrifices I was made to think I had to make in order to find a way to be happy in the world I lived in. I just couldn’t seem to fit in anywhere.” She looked off out of the window. “I was too light uptown and too dark downtown. It was a sad, lonely time before I met your grandfather.” She exhaled and gave me the same longing look she did when she told about the first time that she met my grandfather. The story went that when he approached her at a cabaret downtown, he just assumed the young, striking beauty with icy blue eyes was white. Granddad fell in love with Lucy’s smooth skin and chestnut hair. Grandma Lucy said he never even asked her what color she was—she half thought he didn’t want to know and she wasn’t going to be the one to tell him. She liked escaping Harlem to hang out with the blond-haired boy who had lots of money to shower her with. He was charming and he loved jazz more than anyone she’d ever met. She said that he’d told her something about his heart, how deep and hard it could love.
Grandma Lucy said she wanted that love; as I sat beside her one day on the bench at her vanity, she said something in her spirit that had been abandoned decades before she was even born needed that love and all that came with it. It sounded crazy to me at the time, but the older I get, the more I understand what Grandma Lucy meant as she stared at her pale face in the vanity mirror. While women with skin like hers found little love in the white world, there was even less in the black one. True love to a woman who wasn’t really loved in either world meant everything.
A month after they met, Granddad proposed. That’s when Grandma Lucy decided to tell him the truth about her past. This was because while she was sure she’d lose him, she was terrified that he’d somehow find out who she really was and break things off anyway. She’d seen this happen time and time again in her family, including when her mother lost Grandma Lucy’s father. “Better to feel the pain sooner than later,” she told me. However, it was too late. Granddad was smitten with Grandma Lucy and the two married anyway, vowing to keep her disclosure between the two of them—while he didn’t care, Granddad was from a certain world and way of being, and he knew it would be hard for many of his associates to deal with.
Grandma Lucy said her color wasn’t exactly a secret, it was more of a “don’t ask, don’t tell” thing she kept hidden in the sheets between her and Granddad at night. The only downside was that she was forced to live somewhat of a splintered life. There was the life she had on the Upper West Side with Granddad and his acquaintances and their wives, and her life in Harlem where she socialized with her elite circle of friends. She had to keep the worlds separate: telling her friends uptown that she went to Harlem to visit old friends and do community work, and praying that her friends in Harlem would keep her secret.
“I did what I had to do,” Grandma Lucy said, glancing out of the car window.
I reached for her hand. I couldn’t think of anything to say. I’d never heard my grandmother sound so sad. She never shared the rest of the story and the bits and pieces I did have were what my mother was willing to offer up when she felt like it. According to her, everything was going as fine as one could expect it to be for a passing socialite in the ’50s. Grandma Lucy and Granddad were quite happy until they decided to take a chance and do the one thing any passing person was forbidden to do—have a baby. She said it was forbidden because although she had only a few drops of black blood, there was no telling how the baby would come out. Would it be blanc or brown? Have curly hair or nappy hair? A big nose and round cheeks or a pointy nose and high cheekbones? The worries were enough to send a sane person to the crazy house. But they decided to do it anyway and out came my mother, Mary Elizabeth.
My mother, who, as luck would have it, came out with skin darker than Grandma Lucy’s, was a teenager in the Black Power ’60s, and she outwardly embraced her “black blood”—with the fist and everything. Against my grandfather’s wishes, she spent most of her time in Harlem with my father going to poetry readings, making incense, and doing whatever else people did in those days. Her desire to rebel from her past came to a peak in the early ’70s when she insisted upon going to Howard for college. This was a decision that changed my family’s history.
Certain their stubborn daughter wouldn’t change her mind and that there was no way they’d be able to explain Mary Elizabeth’s decision to attend an HBCU in the South over an Ivy League school in the North, my grandparents decided it was time for Grandma Lucy to start “telling.” By then the white upper class had begun to accept more African-American influence. It was almost in vogue to have “slaves in the family”—as one book would later call it. So being a true socialite, Grandma Lucy researched her history, “going home” to Atlanta and everything. When she returned, she threw a grand New York party and even made her rich white friends donate money in her name to an arts school in Harlem.
While it sounds like a “they lived happily ever after” story, there’s a lot more pain there that could never be told and could never be fully explained. The whole “color” thing grew into a gigantic cancer that virtually devoured their relationship the more my mother fought to deal with her issues with color and push Grandma Lucy into seeing the errors of her ways. I wasn’t sure either of them would ever fully confront the issue.
“Well, enough of that old stuff,” Grandma Lucy said, turning back to me to show sad red eyes. “Let’s talk about this doctor of yours. The one you’re trying to snatch.” Her voice quickly turned from contemplative to mischievous.
“It’s not like that.” I laughed.
“Sure, I know a snatch when I see one. Now tell me all about this young man.”
“He’s a dream,” I said, smiling. “He’s just everything I ever wanted in a man—kind, funny, warm, smart…he’s so smart, Lucy. Sometimes I think he’s one of the smartest people I’ve ever known.”
“What does he do?” she asked, nearly cutting me off.
“He’s a doctor. He’s probably one of the best doctors ever, but that’s not what’s important, Lucy. I love him and I want to get him back.”
Grandma Lucy frowned and a little crease folded down the center of her Botoxed forehead.
