Silence and disbelief. “You’ve got that good hair, look at it, not hair like mine.” I was next to a freshman at Georgia Tech who I had ran into as I wandered out of the subway and picked a random direction and found her lost too looking for direction, feeling safe enough to approach me. So we took the same meandering course, chose a direction to pursue together and walked side by side. She had black leggings on, black and grey, layered tanktops and a hoodie, a black and white bandana folded across her hair. I noticed her hair, maybe because I was trying to narrate her life, explain to myself why she gravitated towards me, whether she was desperate or found kinship. Whether we were the same, whether her skin color was mine, the exact hue, whether that was an indication of shared origins. Was she South Asian? Could I claim her? Could we reminisce and could I look at her as if she were my youth and I was guiding her through a conflictive self-defining journey? One I was still on. Which is maybe why we found each other. I saw her hair and saw it pulled tight against her scalp with fly away frizz curling over edges of her bandana. It was coarse. It was thick. It was not mine. We walked and we asked how the other was settling and talked about the distance from home. Her family was Ethiopia and her exile was going on two years. I also felt exiled but it was not entirely related to my relocation from Ohio to LA. We walked the slope and were derailed by inertia. It brought us to a stop at the bottom of the hill though we would have never chose that intersection, would have never chose for our random relating to be intersecting by that question. We were edging off the curb, hesitant, inching forward moving back, mixed signals causing confusion. From our left, a black woman dressed in brown, brown sweatshirt, darker brown loose pants, spit out a question and I didn’t ignore it this time, didn’t turn away from the speaker with closed ears before her articulations, and instead received her comments, engaged with her question.
“Do you all know where Osama bin Laden is?”
“Hmm?” I was either shocked or unable to process but either way asked for clarification.
“I said, d’y’all know where Osama is, is he dead or alive?”
I was caught in between words and worlds and walked into assumptions colored by racism. “How would we know?”
“Because you’re the same color as him.” As if that was the connection she had been coming to make, the reason her legs compelled her towards us with urgency, the reason she chose our complexions, to reduce our brownness into a soiled puddle of following, of stigma.
“And you’ve got that good hair, look at it, not like mine.”
I had my red, plastic sunglasses on, not dark enough to block out the shock and sadness in my eyes. They were visible through the tinted veil and so was my locked look, directly penetrating her eyes, that squinted at me, grew wrinkled around edges, looked through me defiantly, assessed me, targeted me. There was a curled up smirk in her stand-off stare, one that tried to baffle, tried to silence, fed off my silence as if that was her objective, to leave me silent and crumpled down to a mythic threat. I became instantly embodied, bound by body, aware of my slim fit dark jeans, black and white sneakers, the deep green v-neck shirt, the black short sleeved blazer I wore to evoke professionalism, remnants of the conference I had just attended, the Mexican necklace dangling in beads of green, yellow and golden amber down my throat. It choked. It contracted. It inverted.
And my hair. Tied back in a loose ponytail, my bangs draped over my forehead, short and thick and semi-wavy. My curly strands intertwining, tangled and weaving, dark brown and black, shiny in the sun, polished by praise. My shoulders were opened towards her, the woman I assumed was homeless, whose words I definitely prejudged as being innocuous and perhaps even tinged with anti-reality, with unintelligibility, who I expected was teetering down the concrete floating on delusion, who had no solid grounding of reasoning, even the kind that makes racism possible and materialize into acidic claims.
I tried to dismantle the hateful breath, clouding my mind and vision in swarms, cut through it with a penetrating look of disbelief, of pain, of disappointment. Like a laser beam shot of my humanity. Hoping it was perceptible, visible, past the virulent stench of hate, of alienation, of disassociation. I looked at her. Looked deep. Searching. Confused. I knew I would keeping looking until she turned away or I found answers, whichever came first.
She walked through me, an invisible brown person for so long, benign, model minority, not a target, not accused of the decomposition and degeneration of society. A non-suspect. She flung at me the ugly tool of hate used to incapacitate her, keep her silent and shocked and standing so many times throughout her life, she stole that tool, clung onto its deep grooves in metal flesh, its spiked body, slender and insidious, and propelled its sharpened tongue towards my sense of safety and passing and rattled all that, tore up my insides and my out. Hurled at me was a barrage of paper airplanes with self-guided missiles, aimed at civilians and foreign accents, aimed at turbans and hijabs, at beards and fists of outrage, at turned backs and pleading fronts. Was I dangerous or envied? Was I outcast or insider? What inviolable, unspeakable, implied and disguised law did I defame, did I trespass? To justify her trespass. Her violation. Her doubt. Of my humanity.
“That's what I thought.” was the last razor blade she spit at me. But my skin was already in tatters. She abandoned me to silence, to thought, to internalization and confusion.
My African kin in disorientation and I stood facing the crosswalk and froze our eyes at the white man steadily blinking, inviting us forward. We followed straight prescriptive lines and couldn't help but meander and weave past its boundaries, in and out, wavering, unsure what borders defined us in clarifying, rigid, solid white paint, and which ones confined us, confused us, trapped the bodies of our identities from expression beyond built institutions like this cross walk. We walked on silence, thick and muddy, trudging through the normalcy that continued around us, unaffected.
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