From Bourgeois to Boojie: Black Middle-Class Performances

8 Rosalind

131 EILEEN CHERRY-CHANDLER 8 Rosalind Prologue Time? Tell them it is early winter in the 1970s. Setting? A small black storefront hair salon. Narrator? She sits. Wears a plain top, wide-leg jeans. Platform sneakers. Her hair: undone. Tell them: to hear thunder then gentle rain. The original prose rendition of “Rosalind” appears in the July 2010 issue of Triquarterly Online, an online journal of writing, art, and cultural inquiry sponsored by Northwestern University, www.triquarterly.org. 132 Eileen Cherry-Chandler 1: Shadow Window panes crystalize and frost. Lights wink and glow bright. Darkness blurs the world outside the place owned by my grown cousin Claude. He gestures for me to hop in his chair, he ties an apron around my neck. He asks aer my great aunt who raised me. “How’s my auntie?” I say, “Ma Dear is fine.” I feel him search my hair for new growth. He turns me to the mirror where I see rain become snow beyond the street entrance. Then a human shadow blocks the door. It wiggles the knob. Hesitates. Presses against the door glass. But the door doesn’t budge. The pressing persists, then finally the door gives way. Who is this overgrown girl? Her sopping head and broad wet shoulders push through. She has commonly round hips. She has the big bare brown legs with knee scars deep and dark. Then I realize that the face under the scarf is one I do not want to see, nor do I want her to see me. Rosalind 133 2: She Is Rosalind Two days before she threatened to cut my friend LaNell. Why I got in it? I don’t know. Ain’t that stupid? We knocked her down to the muddy ground before all her little friends, and there were these men standing and watching while warming their hands over a flaming barrel. And there were other grown folks looking out of the windows who say nothing, don’t move a damn muscle. So we took Rosalind’s knife, ran, and I hid it away. And it has been this way for the past two days. Waiting for Rosalind to find me and flat-out kick my ass. I whisper to Claude, “That girl that just came in. Do you do her hair?” “Oh no. No way. Not me,” he answers. “That is one of Mimi’s clients.” Mimi rents the other booth in Claude’s salon. 3: Make-over Paradise Rosalind sits in the same chair where I waited. Leafs through the same magazine. She angles her head like me. She fingers each glamored page like me. And it scares me and angers me. Like me she is entranced, Her mind gone to the makeover paradise that promises contentment. 134 Eileen Cherry-Chandler What lengths we go through to be acceptable in another’s sight— What bullshit we bear to please the world —but I suspect Rosalind puts up with much more than I do. She unpicks the knotted scarf around her neck. Each fingernail spotted with ruby nail polish twists the fabric into a hard, tight ball. This day she wears a dull white T-shirt with a neckline plunge weighted by her mature breasts. Rosalind raises her deep-set eyes. One arm obscures her waist while the other pulls the magazine pages closer to her face. 4: Payment Due I was crazy to pick a fight with this girl. She had done nothing to me. (For awhile at least.) Because when I was new, she says I got payment due to her, and I say I ain’t got nothing. I do not pay nor do I play, even though I was scared shitless. This is what I told LaNell: We must act on her threats. We cannot wait. 5: Secrets At any moment I will be discovered. Rosalind 135 I was not raised for all the wild stuff that I do. Claude, Ma Dear, and all her friends— and all the friends she chooses for me— would die. I privilege them with only half of myself. The secrets of my wholeness are completely my own. They may already know— So every moment I go unnoticed by them and Rosalind is a reprieve. I don’t know how long my luck will last. 6: Magic Fire Mimi bursts through the door...