My minivan churns impatiently as I wait in the long queue. Up ahead, it’s easy to spot my daughter in the gaggle of starched, school-crested shirts and navy-blue pants. She’s the only one with brown eyes and skin to match. She’s the only one whose thick, black hair is tamed into stiff braids.
She is standing apart, her eyes scanning the row of cars, a refugee on a hostile shore waiting for an airlift. When she finally sees our car, she shoulders her heavy book bag—too full of academic pressure for a fourth grader—and a smile lands on her face. She is not ashamed to show me the beautiful Wolof gap in her front teeth. She waves desperately, as if otherwise I might miss her, the lone black child in a sea of white.
Finally, she opens the door and jumps into the back seat. “How was your day?” I say brightly, swallowing the stress of having to pick her up from private school every afternoon. She buckles in and opens her daily treat—today it’s a bag of Doritos and bottled tea. No time to get to the store for apples. Bad mom.
She says nothing, but munches quietly and looks out the window. We pass the blond girls yelling things out of car windows like “Call me if you want to go riding!” or “Don’t forget your swimsuit!”
At ten, my daughter wants, more than anything, to be chosen. She has a crush on Henry Frank (the kids call him HankFrank, as if it were one word). My daughter has a chance with HankFrank because he is funny-goofy, already eccentric, probably gay.
I turn off the radio, which I always do when the kids are in the car, just in case something bubbles up from their mysterious lives. Lately, my daughter has become impenetrable. When I hug her, she stiffens. Even though I am her lifeboat, she will not touch me. She is the kind of lonely that cannot be explained, so it becomes someone else’s fault. Mine.
“Did you know that I am invisible?” Her words come in a scratchy little-girl voice, but she is too old for make-believe. She is stating a fact. My heart is a block of ice. I glance at her in the rearview mirror. She keeps eating Doritos vacantly.
Suddenly, I am six. It is 1967 and my first-grade teacher, Mrs. Houston, is so severe, every inch of me wants to please her.
I figure out after the first day that I am smarter than the other kids. The white kids. Every day, I want prove my worth to Mrs. Houston by giving her the right answers. She calls on the other children; I don’t understand why she doesn’t see me. I stretch my hand higher, accent my eagerness with a few “Ooh, oohs,” but still she gazes over my head to the dolt behind me with the ruby curls.
This is not what I had imagined when I’d longed to go to school. I’d dreamed of friends and books and scissors and the sweet smell of paste. I dreamed of chalk scraping on the board and gold stars on my homework. I never dreamed I would disappear.
My daughter finishes her Doritos and crumples the bag loudly. I stop the car in front of the manicured lawn of a stranger. I get out and open my daughter’s door. She tracks me wide-eyed, afraid that she is in trouble. I unlock her seat belt and pull her out of the car. Her classmates peer at us curiously as they drive by in their moms’ SUVs. She doesn’t know it yet, but after today, my daughter will never see them again.
I take her shoulders and gaze into her eyes. I look at her so long that the hard resentment of her spine bends toward me. Her anger softens to tears.
“I can see you,” I say, taking her into my arms.
An excerpt from Know the Mother, by Desiree Cooper (Wayne State University Press, 2016). Buy Know The Mother.
Desiree Cooper is a former attorney, Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist and Detroit community activist whose fiction dives unflinchingly into the intersection of racism and sexism. A 2015 Kresge Artist Fellow, Cooper uses the compressed medium of flash fiction, to reveal what it means to be human. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Callaloo, Detroit Noir, Best African American Fiction 2010 and Tidal Basin Review, among other online and print publications. Her first collection of flash fiction, Know the Mother, was published by Wayne State University Press in 2016. Cooper was a founding board member of Cave Canem, a national residency for emerging black poets. She is currently a Kimbilio Fellow, a national residency for African American fiction writers. She lives in metro Detroit.