Boy, Snow, Bird

by Helen Oyeyemi

“Yeah, your kind isn’t so rare. Spoiled brat. When he’s a bachelor, life’s tough because he has everything he needs except Miss Right, and when he finds a sweetheart with the full package—beauty, brains, sweet temper—she’s too much, she’s smothering him.” He poured the rest of the glass of water into the harbor. “Guess I wasted my breath, huh?” “Guess you did.”

Getting pushed around as a kid had made me realistic about my capabilities. I know some people learn how to take more knocks and keep going. Not me. I’m the other kind. That’s what stopped me from telling Charlie Vacic I’d marry him. See, I’m looking for a role with lines I can say convincingly, something practical. And I know Charlie, or at least I know that he’s some kind of idealist.

There’s no use trying to describe her in detail; all that can really be said is that she had the kind of beauty that people write songs about and occasionally commit suicide over. The type who seems a very long way away even when she’s right there in your arms.

Somewhere in among the names of all those mermaids, warriors, saints, goddesses, queens, scientists, and poets I could see a woman trying to cover all the bases, searching for things her daughter would need in order to make friends with life.

What if I’d told that drawing room tea party: “Sidonie likes the bookstore too, because nobody gives her a hard time there. White girls don’t spill ink all over her dress at the bookstore, and colored boys don’t twist her arm behind her back, and nobody stands in her way just leering like crazy when all she wants to do is walk down the corridor. That’s the kind of girl that exists out there, less than a mile away from those linen curtains. But if you saw her without talking to her, she’d make you paranoid in a way that only a colored girl can make a white woman paranoid.

She clearly intended for Snow to be part of her lasting-beauty club. And really, what of it? Most of the people who say beauty fades say it with a smirk. Fading is more than just expected, it’s what they want to see. I don’t.

“It does us good to fight for life,” Queen Sidie said, and her lips were wrinkles that clung to her teeth. Her words were empty; she and King Mizak were too weak and weary to put up a real fight. It was slaughter, and the boy and the girl were merciless. They said: “Remember you did the same.” Kazim used to give me strange looks whenever I tapped a corner of one of his comic strips and asked what was next. He thought it was strange of me to ask. What’s next is what happened before.

It was never ‘Will you buy me candy?’ with her; she always wanted stuff that . . . I don’t know, stuff you always felt in danger of losing her to. Books, music. If you took her to one of those big art galleries, you wouldn’t be able to find her again until closing time.

It’s not work I could do, breaking something and then breaking it again and again until it looks the way I want it to. I’d falter, and try to go back to where I’d started. I’d just be there all day making solid gold blobs.

I kind of like that look. It’s endearing. But what if one day you figure out who you are and where you are and who I am and realize it’s all a big mistake?”

“What you don’t understand is that we’re being kept down out there. All the way down. In my town you couldn’t vote unless you passed a literacy test.

From this I can only make inferences about Olivia’s childhood and begin to measure the difference between being seen as colored and being seen as Snow. What can I do for my daughter? One day soon a wall will come up between us, and I won’t be able to follow her behind it.

Maybe there is no Snow, but only the work of smoke and mirrors. The Whitmans need someone to love, and have found too much to hate in each other, and so this lifelike little projection walks around and around a reel, untouchable.

some of the regulars, especially the old ones, still stare at Mr. Chen as if they never saw an Asian man before. Some of them ask him how he learned to play ragtime so good when he wasn’t born with it in his soul, and Mr. Chen just looks at them all through a pair of opera glasses and says: “Ha ha.” Even if there hadn’t been Chens in New Orleans since 1900, Mr. Chen would still have jazz in his soul,

“Vietcong just love coloreds. And coloreds love them right back.” I forced a laugh. Sometimes all the other kids want is for you to show you’re a good sport. If you stand out, you can’t expect people not to mention it.

I’ve met Great-aunt Effie enough times to go beyond first impressions, and there isn’t a bad bone in that woman’s body. But . . . that girl you mentioned, the one who feels cheated, Great-aunt Effie is like that. She thinks there are treasures that were within her reach, but her skin stole them from her. She thinks she could’ve been somebody. But she is somebody.

My other grandma, the one I don’t share with you, sometimes says a little something about the Millers being “sensible people” who’ve made certain choices in order to remain comfortable just as any other “sensible” people would and what does any of it matter now that the world’s changing?

I’ve grown up around people whose families have lived their lives without trying to invent advantages—some of them have marched and staged sit-ins, others have just lived with their heads held high.

The one thing I’d tell you about me is that I’m a deceiver. In another draft of this letter I wrote that I wasn’t always like this, but let’s try the truth and see what it does.

She was used to being treated like this. It was nothing to her. I had a moment of hating her, or at least understanding why Mom did. Thankfully it came and went really quickly, like a dizzy spell, or a three-second blizzard. Does she know that she does this to people? Dumb question. This is something we do to her.

A look, a word, a touch. How could anyone enjoy this, the possibility, necessity even, of their being called to heel in this way? It disturbs me that there’s a part of my heart or mind, or some spot where the two meet, a spot that isn’t mine because I’m a wife. This part isn’t really me at all, but a promise I made on a snowy day.

I’ve been so afraid of getting closeness wrong, because I don’t know how to do it, because I don’t know what my mistakes reveal—maybe they reveal very good reasons for my having been unloved as a child, I just don’t know.

I hate that my life is teaching me that I can only be loved if I put my love out of reach and just drift above people until they love my remoteness.