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  “Oh my God, you look like Buckwheat!” someone invariably said, pointing to the mass of hair on my head. Eddie Murphy’s SNL version of Buckwheat was still fresh and popular, all hair and teeth and “Ohtay!”

  “Do Buckwheat!”

  And I would do it. I would go into the “Buckwheat Got Shot” routine, with my hands in the air like Eddie’s. Every time I said, “Ohtay,” the girls would die.

  Now that I was willingly their clown, the directives began.

  “Act like you put your finger in a socket.”

  “Pretend you’re a Kewpie doll.”

  I pulled my hair up to make it stand on end. Making them laugh gave me the illusion of agency and control. Minstrelsy makes the audience comfortable. Now that I am on the other side of it, and proud of my blackness, they wouldn’t know what to do with me. People don’t know what to do with you if you are not trying to assimilate.

  Nevertheless, I did manage to create real, lasting friendships with other girls during this period. And we liked to have fun. We had our first kegger in seventh grade, right before school let out for summer. We were farting around in a park and we saw these older kids hide their pony keg in the bushes. We waited for them to leave, snuck over, got their pony keg, and rolled it right on over to my friend Missy Baldwin’s house. None of us knew how to open it, so we hammered a screwdriver into the side until we made a hole and were able to drain the beer into a bucket.

  And then we had all this beer! So we called people—meaning boys—and they biked over to Missy’s house. There was just this trove of Huffys and BMXs dropped in her front yard as kids raced to the back practically shouting, “Beer!” The house got trashed and kids put her lawn furniture into her pool. This wasn’t even at night and it was in a planned community. But her parents were hippies and were like, “Missy. Man, that’s not cool.”

  That wouldn’t have worked with my parents, but they had no idea where I was anyway. They put in long days at their telecommunications jobs—my dad in San Jose, my mom in Oakland, both a one-hour commute away. My older sister, Kelly, who acted as if she had birthed herself, was given a very long leash, but she had a lot of responsibility, too. If anything happened, my sister had to take care of it. If I had a dentist appointment, she would have to take time off from school activities to play chauffeur. Class projects, homework—she was my Google before there was Google. In high school, she loved sports but didn’t have my natural athleticism. She quickly recognized the gifts she had and segued into being a team manager and coaching youth basketball. Everything she wore was from Lerner, and she became a manager there at sixteen. There she was in her blazers with the huge shoulder pads. I idolized her, but also took her guidance and intelligence for granted.

  She and Tracy, my little sister, had the caregiver-child relationship because of the eleven years between them. I was in the middle, completely under my family’s radar. So I created a family of my friends. They were everything to me, and as a result, I was hardly ever home.

  I only drank with friends, enjoying the game of getting the alcohol as much as drinking it. We’d steal from our parents or con older relatives into buying it for us. We used to play a drinking game called vegetable. Each person would choose a vegetable and try to say it without showing our teeth, and then we’d give someone another vegetable to say. You’d always pick something tough, like “rhubarb” or “asparagus” or “russet potatoes.” If you showed your teeth—by laughing, for instance—you had to pound a Keystone Light or whatever contraband we’d gotten our hands on that evening. And it doesn’t take a lot to laugh when you’re drunk on cheap beer and high, which, oftentimes, we were.

  But there were little matters of etiquette in these situations that reminded me of my place. When you shared a can of beer, the directive was always “Don’t nigger-lip it.” It meant don’t get your mouth all over it.

  Another common term was “nigger-rig.” To nigger-rig something was to MacGyver it or fix it in a half-ass way—to wit, opening a pony keg with a screwdriver. Sometimes people would catch themselves saying “nigger” in front of me.

  “Oh there’s niggers and there’s, you know, cool black people,” they’d say to excuse it. “You’re not like them.”

  In my English class in ninth grade, we read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn aloud. The teacher made us take alternating paragraphs in order of where we sat in class. We were seated alphabetically by name, so as a “U” I was in the back of the class. Twain uses the word “nigger” exactly 219 times in the book. I would count the paragraphs to read ahead and see if there were any “niggers” in what I had to say. Each time a kid said “nigger,” the whole class turned their heads to watch my response. Some turned to look at me just before they read it aloud, wincing in an apology that only made me more aware of the blackness I was trying so hard to escape. Others turned to smile as they said it, aiming “nigger” right at me.

  But most times it felt like kids at my school simply forgot I was black. Perversely, I was relieved when they did. I had so completely stopped being black to these people that they could speak to me as a fellow white person.

  “Nigger” wasn’t the only slur slung around at the few people of color who dotted the overwhelmingly white student population. But being so focused on my own situation, I wasn’t always proficient in racist slang. Sure, I could decipher jokes about the Latino kids and the couple of Asian girls, but it took me a long time to realize people weren’t calling our classmate Mehal a “kite.” In Pleasanton you were either Catholic or Mormon, and Mehal was proudly Jewish. She invited us all to her bat mitzvah. Nobody went. Our belief system was “Jews killed Jesus, Jews are bad.” Mehal flew the flag, and so she was out, but when we found out Eric Wadamaker was Jewish, it was like he’d had a mask ripped off at the end of Scooby-Doo.

  “You know Waddy’s a Jew?”

  “Whaaaat? But he’s so cool.”

  The pressure to assimilate infused every choice we made, no matter our race. Kids who didn’t use the slurs certainly didn’t speak up against classmates or parents using them. They adopted the language or they kept silent. Because to point out inequality in the town would mean Pleasanton was not perfect. And Pleasanton had to be perfect.

  WHEN I WAS THIRTEEN, MY PARENTS BEGAN SENDING ME BACK TO OMAHA alone to spend summers with my mother’s mother. It was at my request; my older sister was going off to college and I was looking for more freedom. As soon as the plane landed, I heard a sound like the sprinklers of California when they started up, that sharp zzt-zzt, but at a constant hum. It was the sound of insects. Cicadas provided the backdrop to my Omaha summers.

  My grandmother brought my cousin Kenyatta to the airport to meet me that first year. A year younger than me, she was effortlessly cool. My grandmother raised Kenyatta while her mother, Aunt Carla, was in and out of jail. Grandma also raised Kenyatta’s little brother. Aunt Carla was never out for more than a year and a half. She was awesome, don’t get me wrong; she just had a problem with drugs. Kenyatta was very thin, like me, with really big eyes and chocolate-brown skin. Her lips literally looked like four bubbles, briefly joining on the edge of bursting. “Those lips,” boys always said in admiration, making kissing faces at her.

  Kenyatta gave me access to the cool black kids in the neighborhood. She had all these tough friends, some of whom had already been to juvie. They were all pretty and all having sex.

  She had told her friends her cousin from California was coming, so a bunch of them waited outside Grandma’s house to meet me. To them California was three things: beaches, celebrities, and gangs. They came ready to talk to me about what I had seen of the Crips and the Bloods.

  “Hi there,” I said, getting out of the car.

  Their faces sank. It was over.

  “Oh, Jesus,” her friend Essence said. “Your cousin is white, Kenyatta.”

  “You’re an Oreo,” said this boy Sean.

  It wasn’t a surprise, but it wasn’t something to get upset about. I had hoped t
o get off the plane and slip into a new life. Be a Janet Jackson doing Charlene on Diff’rent Strokes, or, my greatest wish, Lisa Bonet on The Cosby Show. The cool black girl that Pleasanton could never appreciate. But I was still just me. Luckily, I was under Kenyatta’s protection. They could tease me, but only so much.

  “Did you bring the tapes?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” I said, opening my carry-on to pull out two cassettes. She had asked me to tape California radio stations so her crew could press play and be transported to the beaches with the celebrities and the gangbangers.

  We all went upstairs and crowded into her room, which would now also become my room. My grandmother had crammed two twin beds in there, so we all sat down. Kenyatta couldn’t get that tape in her boom box fast enough.

  Everyone leaned in as she pressed play. Crowded House’s “Don’t Dream It’s Over” filled the room.

  “What the fuck is this?” asked Sean.

  “It’s the radio back home,” I said. “This is what they play in California.”

  “Do they play L.A. Dream Team?” asked Kenyatta. “World Class Wreckin’ Cru?”

  I pretended to know who they were, then remembered the radio station’s tag line. “Um,” I said. “They play the hits.”

  I’d taped 120 minutes of the Top 40 of Pleasanton. At first they gave it a chance. Heart. Whitesnake. They gave up at Tiffany.

  Kenyatta put in a New Edition tape, and my heart leapt. I was obsessed with them, the few black boys who showed up on MTV. We girls bonded right there, talking about Bobby Brown leaving the group and Johnny Gill coming in. And which one of us Ralph Tresvant would pick out of a crowd.

  I could hold my own talking about New Edition, but I felt real green on being black. And everyone was black in my grandmother’s North Omaha neighborhood. Beyond New Edition, I wasn’t up on anything when it came to being black. My grandma lived on the edge of what was considered “a bad area,” and it was its own world, without white people. The way people talked about white folks when there were no white folks around was dramatically different—just as white folks spoke differently about black people when they thought black people weren’t around, except in Pleasanton, where they forgot I was black because I blended in so well. I began studying my cousin Kenyatta and her friends to relearn blackness. Otherwise, I would be dismissed as “corny,” which was the death kiss in Omaha. To be corny there was the equivalent of being labeled a “nerd” in Pleasanton—you could not come back from it. No boy would even consider coming near you. Being off-limits and forever friend-zoned was a given as the black girl in Pleasanton. But in Omaha, I had a shot at getting boys to like me the way I liked them. I couldn’t blow it.

  I earned respect pretty quickly, and I’m sure a lot of that had to do with being Kenyatta’s cousin. Mostly I did it by keeping a poker face and not saying anything, no matter how surprised or confused I was by something people did or said. Nobody tried to mess with me.

  I liked North Omaha from the jump—the dampness in the air, and how the sun never really shone. Somehow, though, the few white folks we saw on trips to the mall were all kind of tanned in this ruddy color that white people turn when they’re overheated. Everyone just lived out on their blocks, hanging back, chilling, talking shit, flirting. Every so often, the sky would suddenly turn black and everyone would start running because there was a tornado coming. As soon as it blew by, everyone came back outside to the streets.

  It was Midwest summer, when there’s nothing to do. We were kids with no jobs, so every morning the conversation went like this: “Where are we gonna go today?” “What boy’s house can we walk to?” “Whose parents aren’t home?” “Who has a car?” Just finding somebody with a car was incredibly rare. In Pleasanton, everybody had a car. But in Omaha, people got around through what they called “jitneys”: elderly people that you knew your whole life would say, “Hey, call me if you need me to get to the store. Just give me three dollars.”

  Teenagers even drank differently in North Omaha. It wasn’t the binge drinking of mixed drinks in plastic cups, like in Pleasanton. If you were kicking back on the stoop you had a forty or a wine cooler. The penny candy store was right next to the liquor store, so when we hung out in front of the candy store, folks might have thought we were there to get candy, but we were really waiting on a mark. When you found one, you would shoulder-tap the guy. “Heeeey, can you get me a forty of Mickey’s big mouth?” (Mickey’s “big mouth” is a malt liquor also known as a “grenade,” for the shape of the bottle it comes in.) It was never tough.

  It was a very exciting time in my life, and there was a bit of danger that felt glamorous. The summer I was thirteen, crack started to show up in North Omaha. My aunt Carla also got out of jail. I saw her as effortlessly cool and admired her gift for always having guys around. She was staying with a boyfriend, even though she always had a home at my grandmother’s if she needed it. The guys who she introduced me to were always really nice, and only later would you find out that so-and-so was involved in one of the largest drug busts in the history of the Midwest. Aunt Carla came over to Grandma’s soon after she was sprung and saw a letter from my parents. They were sending me eighty dollars’ cash a week that summer to give to my grandmother. Selfish me kept that cash, of course.

  “Let me hold that eighty dollars,” Aunt Carla said, “and on Friday, I’ll give you three hundred dollars and we’ll go to Red Lobster.”

  “Sure,” I said, handing her the money. It was Monday, and I knew I’d have another eighty dollars the next week, so it wasn’t a big deal.

  Wednesday my aunt came over again. “Give me your sizes,” she said. “I wanna get you some back-to-school clothes.”

  “I want Guess jeans,” I said, and then reeled off my sizes along with a list of additional asks.

  Lo and behold, Friday came and Aunt Carla showed up in a limo, carrying shopping bags full of clothes for Kenyatta and me.

  “Now let’s go to Red Lobster,” she said, handing me my three hundred dollars.

  It was my first time in a limo. Kenyatta and I opened the windows and waved to everyone we passed on the ride to dinner. At the restaurant, we feasted—ordering the lobster and shrimp combo and eating every Cheddar Bay biscuit in sight. When we emerged rubbing our stomachs, the limo was gone.

  “I only had it for the way over,” Aunt Carla said, slotting a coin in the nearby pay phone as she took a drag on a cigarette. Her friend eventually showed up in a Buick, and as we started the drive home, she said, “I need to stop at Kmart. Stay in the car,” she told us.

  She went inside to write a few bad checks while we waited.

  “You girls doing good?” said the driver.

  We both nodded.

  He proceeded to pull out a crack pipe and smoke up. The windows were closed, so we couldn’t help but be hotboxed. We didn’t feel any secondhand effects, but I would always immediately recognize that smell as an adult, traveling the country and going to clubs.

  We were familiar with crack already, because our friends were dealers. We’d seen plenty of crack pipes and even watched people weigh it for parceling. North Omaha was rapidly changing, and every summer, the changes escalated. The L.A.-based dealers had begun to spread out across the country to get a piece of the local drug trade everywhere. Gang members came to North Omaha, selling a lifestyle as if they were setting up franchises. But it was all so bizarre to watch. North Omaha is made up of a bunch of families that have been there for generations. You walk down the street and somebody can identify what family you belong to by your facial features. All of a sudden here come these powerful gangs, splitting up families as kids randomly chose different gang sets.

  A lot of my cousins and neighborhood kids that I’d grown up with during my summer visits, boys and girls, began to claim allegiance to L.A. gangs that they didn’t know anything about. It started as a saccharine, almost Disney-like version of gang life. When I returned at fourteen, every young person was touched by some sort of criminal e
nterprise, with varying degrees of success. Some kids got one rock of cocaine and announced, “I’m a drug dealer.” Then there were kids who as teenagers were doing, in terms of drug dealing, very well for themselves. They had their own apartments and flaunted their wealth.

  At the end of the day, I didn’t look at crack so negatively, because I saw our little friends making money off it. Drug dealing felt like any other job to me. I only knew young dealers and the random ones that my aunt knew. I didn’t see the underbelly. The violence, the desperation, the addiction. All I knew was, I gave my aunt eighty dollars and she gave me three hundred dollars back. That was integrity. I later found out Aunt Carla asked her friend who was a booster—a shoplifter by profession, thank you—to get those school clothes for me at the mall. I didn’t think less of her or those clothes. I thought Aunt Carla was smart. And I went to Red Lobster in a limo. If someone smoked crack on the way home, that was a small price to pay for the adventure. A footnote, really. What remains is that she kept her word. In retrospect, I guess it’s naïve to think this would all end well, but I saw honor among thieves.

  In the midst of this, I was still Nickie, trying to get boys to like me, specifically Kevin Marshall. The summer I was fourteen, Kenyatta and I invited two boys over to my grandmother’s with the promise of alcohol. Andy Easterbrook and beautiful Kevin. I was truly, madly, deeply, over the moon in love with Kevin. He was caramel colored, with green eyes, and a great athlete. He wasn’t supposed to like a chocolate girl like me. And he liked me.

  First order of business: coming through on that promised alcohol. Kenyatta and I decided to steal my aunt Joanne’s wine coolers. This was the biggest mistake of the summer! God, if there was anybody who counted their wine coolers it was Aunt Joanne. But when you’re a kid and you see two four-packs and there are boys to impress, you take one or two and say, “There’s still some left.” Boy, did we pay for that.