“Growing up, I loved you, but I wanted so much that you had,” she says. “I hate what happened to me, but it was good I moved away from you and our mothers.”
I’m curious but also hurt to hear this.
“I can think of a dozen reasons why living here was better than living with them, but why did you need to get away from me?”
“You’ll think it’s silly in that way that girls who never have to think about these things think it’s silly,” she says, her smile self-deprecating, her eyes knowing.
“Tell me anyway.”
“I was dark.” She lifts her braids. “My hair was coarse. I was the odd egg in our little nest, and everyone knew it.”
“What the hell do you mean?” I demand.
“You don’t think about it, but our mothers look exactly alike. Your father was white.” With her free hand, she tosses a few blades of grass into the river. “They were light and you were even lighter, but my dad was black, and I look different.”
It reminds me of August telling me how displaced he felt sometimes. The irony of me feeling like I didn’t belong because I was “too white” and Lo being jealous because she was “too dark” strikes me as funny, and I release a giggle.
“That’s funny to you?” Lo asks, one side of her full mouth tilted.
“It’s just . . . I never felt like I fit in our neighborhood because I looked so different, and the girls always said I was stuck up and thought I was better than them. I really just wanted to fit. I just wanted to look like everyone else.”
“And I just wanted to look like you.” Lo twists her mouth to the side. “When I came here, MiMi sniffed that shit out right away.”
A movement in my peripheral vision catches my eye. “No, Sarai.”
I pull my hand free of Lo’s and walk to the water’s edge, retrieving my little adventurer. I plop down on the grass, careless of the black dress I wore to the funeral, and sit my daughter between my legs. Lo settles in a puddle of black linen beside me, stretching her legs out on the grass.
“MiMi knew that even beyond the hurt of what Mama had done, choosing that motherfucker over me,” Lo says with dispassion, “that there was another hurt under it all. Mama choosing him only reinforced that I wasn’t good enough. Maybe she didn’t love me as much as she would have if I’d been . . . different.”
Memories of Aunt May complaining about Lo’s hair come to mind. She’d say she didn’t know what to do “with hair like this.” When Lo learned to press her own hair, Aunt May and my mother would complain about the “smell of burning hair” in the house. A hundred little thoughts come to me like pinpricks, piercing my ignorant bliss.
“I’m so sorry,” I whisper. “I hope I never made you feel that way, Lo.”
“No, not you.” She reaches for my hand again and smiles. “You were my hopscotch, Bo. I knew you didn’t feel that way.”
“Did MiMi do one of her cleansing ceremonies to fix you, too?” I only half-laugh because I’m still not sure what that was or what it did, but I know I’m changed somehow.
“It wasn’t that simple,” Lo says. “It never is. No, she told me about a boy she loved when she was young. When he came to the house, her mother said he failed the paper-bag test.”
“What is a paper-bag test?”
“You have to remember it was New Orleans, years ago,” Lo offers. “Our family was filled with quadroons and octoroons and a whole bunch of words for almost white. So when she came home with a brown brother, her mother broke out the paper bag. They would hold a paper bag against your skin, and if you were darker than the paper bag, you didn’t pass the test.”
“That’s awful. Oh my God.”
“Yeah, and MiMi regretted letting him go. He ended up marrying a friend of hers. He treated her like a queen, and they lived a happy life not a block from where he asked MiMi to marry him.” Lo blinks at tears, her lips tightening. “She told me that she missed out on him because of a stupid paper bag,” Lo says. “And anyone who misses out on me would be as foolish as she had been and that they would live to regret it.”
I glance down at my daughter, with her skin lighter than mine and her eyes of blue–violet, and I swear to myself that no one will ever make her feel out of place or question her identity. It may not be a promise I can completely keep, but I’ll try.
“Anyway, enough reminiscing.” Lo looks at me, clear-eyed and probing. “It’s the future we need to discuss.”
I watch the sun dipping into the long, watery line of horizon, like a cookie diving into milk. “It’s getting dark.” I stand, brushing my dress off and bending to pick up Sarai.
“Listen to me.” Lo grabs my wrist, looking up from her plot on the riverbank. “You can’t stay here, Bo.”
I swallow a quick retort, a defense. Even though these were my very own thoughts before I came to the river, I resist the idea of leaving. “What if it’s not . . .” I gulp sudden trepidation, “. . . safe to leave? What if Caleb comes after us?”
“You’ve done all you can to keep him from doing that.” Lo squeezes my wrist gently until I meet her eyes. “The leash is tight around his neck, but it’s also tight around yours. Think about all you gave up. Get it back.”
