We're Going to Need More Wine - Gabrielle Union Page 0,5

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