Since I decided to sponge off of my husband for the next two years, I've been reading. A lot. I was going through a book a day at one point during this vacay and I had to consciously spread out the reading over a period of days since I usually lacked a backup plan when I finished. What was I suppose to do after turning that last page?? Clean the bathroom? Scrub the screens? Vacuum our home? Uh, I went on vacation to relax, not to channel the inner workings of a desperate housewife. I'm all about living the good life. So y'all can go Jane Eyre someone else. This wifey likes to nap.Just kidding. I do housework. But I use a timer so that I don't waste my day baby-wipin' the louvers and pullin' 5 feet of hair out of my drain. (3 feet is sufficient to keep the drain clear for at least a week's worth of leg shaving, thank you very much).
Anyhoo, during this time, I've read a lot of really really BAD books. (How many ways can a lady attorney journey from her mid-west town and "find herself" in NYC as well as a time share in the Hampton's while accidentally falling for her best friend's fiance'?). No joke, there's some bad shiz out there. (Don'tknowifI'mallowedtosayshiz).
So after asking my friend, Legrand (a librarian) for some suggestions, he recommended "Mixed" by Angela Nissel. HILARIOUS. So much so that I'm contemplating overlooking the polygamist overtones of his name to call my first child after him.
Mixed is about Angela Nissel's life having a black mom and a white dad. In the 70's and 80's. While living in Philly.
I'm still laughing out loud thinking about the time her Mom lied and told her that David Hasselhoff was half black so that she would have at least ONE person to identify with on TV (“Look at his skin! It’s as tan as yours. And his hair, isn’t that what your hair looks like when it rains?”). She was in the third grade and ended up doing a report on him for Black History Month. Had the whole class convinced he was bi-racial.
Or her first date with a white guy when she was in her mid-twenties. She decided to act just like she would with a black guy. So while they were browsing through a toy store, she taught him how to play "Find the Black Person", wherein they had to find at least one black doll that did not have a gold chain attached to it. He found a Lawrence Fishburne Matrix figurine, but "no points. They have to be fictional dolls. Not based on movies or real people." They ended up finding three tiny figurine dolls in the back of the store, and as the date came to a close, "he nearly shoved me in my car before giving me a cheerful wave and jogging off." Obviously, he wasn't the one. And while some of her stories have a sad tone, this one just made you pee from laughing so hard.
On asking her Mom (a nurse at the Black Panther free clinic) how she met her Dad:
“Mom, what did you think of Dad when you first met him?”
“I thought he was black,” she replied.
Oh. My. G**. Who approved my mother’s Black Panther application? If she couldn’t tell the difference between a black man and a white man, how effective could she have been at fighting the Man? How could she ever think my green-eyed, freckle-faced, sandy-haired father was black? He’s so pale that my mother’s post divorce code name for him was Master Alabaster, as in “Girl, I have to go to court again. Master Alabaster hasn’t paid child support for six months, but I saw him driving a brand-new car.”
During this time of racial inequality and straight out bigotry, as was reflected in the heinous NYP cartoon last week, it's nice to have an author choose humor to actually dissipate (rather than perpetuate) the language and disease of racism.
Really, a must read.
