The Girl Who Cut Her Hair Pt. 1
I
It came to be, during a long and prosperous reign, the King of New York decided it was time he died. He hesitated to tell his daughter because she loved him very much, but the day came he could no longer spare her the news. He called her to his solar overlooking Niagara Falls, in the highest tower of his sprawling estate; there, she tread across the fur-strewn floor of a room resplendent with her own image reflected from ruby and topaz, through crystalline doors, and found her father standing atop of an ivory balcony that curved like the neck of swan, from which he surveyed the immensity of the Catskills and the foaming falls below. The sun, as ever, was a great ball of water, cerulean in the center of a golden sky.
The daughter climbed the steep stairs to join her father at the railing. The king wore a silver-blue robe sewn from dewdrops, a cloak made of leopard hide clasped around his throat with a silver brooch shaped like a deer head, and to her affectionate eyes struck as grandly handsome an image as he must have in youth, dark as oak, his skin smooth as stone polished by the tide. At the sound of her coming, he turned to greet her with an inscrutable smile. His gray eyes shone like scales of the trout who leapt from the Niagara River before diving to hunt the bugs who scuttled the riverbed. When let down his hair descended to his waist, black as obsidian and strung with red beads that clicked musically around his knees; on that day he wore his tresses in a bun, a black moon orbiting his broad and thoughtful brow. The daughter wished she could read that moon for portents of the future, because she had witnessed his growing distance during affairs of state, his boredom to hear advisers discuss taxes and tariffs and civil strife; thus, she had grown to suspect his intentions.
“I am going to die,” he told her simply.
“Please do not do this,” his daughter begged. “The people are not ready to lose you, and above all, my heart would break.”
“Light of my night”—the king gazed on the waterfall—“today I oversaw my four thousandth and fifth execution. I have been keeping count since the first, and they ceased to interest me around the one hundredth time. Today two women came to me, each claiming the same newborn as her own. I demanded the babe be cut in twain with a half for each woman, and whoever was the real mother would object and thus receive the child. I have played this trick forty-nine times. Even now I cannot remember who the mother was. For all I know, my guard simply cut the babe in two. No, my heart, my reign has ended.”
Thus, the king arranged his funeral with gusto rarely seen from him in recent years, his spirit restored by the promise of no tomorrows. In his joy he seemed to regain something of the barefoot boy who had won a kingdom through his cleverness. And all the while, his daughter grieved.
It seemed appropriate, on the night before his funeral, that a furious storm descended from the sun to scourge the forests, and drown the meekest villages under swollen rivers, and lightning crackled as if the heavens had appointed themselves japing minstrels to laugh at man’s folly. Come morning, the daughter sat before her vanity in white silks, unable to stop her weeping as handmaidens combed out her hair. Longer than her father’s and deeply black, it trailed down her back and over the floor like a cape. It tangled and snarled and braided and locked and feathered and crimped and ebbed and eddied. Attentive to her sorrow, her handmaidens sang ballads of lovers who lived happily ever after as they oiled her hair into a single onyx blade. They wove it with lilacs for mourning.
As her father’s funeral procession marched through the emerald Catskills, she followed at the side of his litter carved from red oak. Carried upon the shoulders of four manservants in violet tunics, the King of New York was attended by his chamberlain, the nobles of greater and lesser houses, generals, admirals, viceroys returned from their foreign posts, his hundred closest servants, a number of drunken fairies jesting gaily as they winged about, and a growing number of brown hill boys who seemed to spring like gophers from the brush to follow the procession, dancing, talking shit, wrestling over candies thrown by the king who smiled upon them, their youth his sacred text. Gazing on the evergreens, his mental sky bronzed with nostalgia, he called his daughter’s attention to the places they passed.
“There is where I negotiated peace with the Hill Folk,” he told her. “That valley is where I slew the griffin. Beyond that, the waterfall where I met Adele of the Traveling Vale. She was not your mother,” he sighed. “Would that she were.”
At last they came to the mountaintop grove where stood his tomb, a spire carved from a single ebon block. The manservants lowered the king to the earth and there he stayed, reclined in silk pillows. A wind on the peak made birch trees bend as if trying to work out a crick in their spines, and the daughter pulled her moth-spun cloak tight. Nobles stepped forward to tell tales of the king’s deeds. He laughed and even wept, though his daughter noticed him grow impatient. When it came the high priest’s turn, the king cut him off.
“I, King Jack the Clever, Jack Jenkinhorn, Jack Spunk, Jack Nasty, six hundred and twenty-first King of New York, Lord Regent of the Catskills, Protector of the Sacred Codes”—he smiled—“Farter of Dinners and Taker of Naps have led a blessed life. Know ye this”—a hill boy played a dirge on his fife—“that I regret the times I have not loved my daughter as well as I should, and the sons whom I killed. May you all know peace in your time.”
The daughter’s eyes welled with tears. They fell to the ground not as water but seeds that one day would grow into cedar, ash, juniper, and oak. She kissed her father’s hand, his skin cool on hers. She sang:
Wawindaji mtukufu hatacheza tena kwenye duara
Yeye ni mwiga katika uwanja wa mungu
“Thank you,” her father said and died. At the same moment, his hundred closest servants died. His body was borne into the tomb.
That day, every newspaper in New York ran a front page headline on the death of the king. Below that, stocks. Further below, horoscopes. It enraged the daughter that the fickle commoners would carry on sowing their crops and preparing their larders for winter. It seemed no one mourned her father but her, and she was allowed a mere day for grief, her coronation on the morrow.
II
When the bell rang, Malaysia stood at the door to collect her students’ poems as they filed out the room, leaving into the world with assonance looping in their heads. Only six of the twelve had come for workshop that day, freshmen and sophomores, the upperclassmen having skipped eighth period to either vote or soak up the carnivalesque atmosphere of the day. Impatient to get on the road herself, Malaysia unplugged the CD player she’d used to play Illmatic, wrapped the cord around it, slipped their Nas-inspired work into her backpack, put on her coat, and was ready to leave when she saw Isabella still seated in the empty circle of desks. Freckled and big-eyed, the petite sophomore gazed on her red Converse All-Stars. It was clear the girl wanted consoling. Isabella’s moods, which typically varied between overeager or sullen, had been angry that day, enough that Mal left her alone out of respect. She deliberated her next move, irritated to have been waylaid into the girl’s angst while the floods of history moved around them. Still, she decided to stay.
“What’s wrong?” she asked Isabella.
“My mom broke her leg last night,” Isabella said softly. “We were in the E.R. for eight hours.”
Without another word, Mal opened her arms and the girl ran into them. Mal was a tall, fat woman with a full bosom. She looked like a matron, and, over twelve years of teaching, children had found it easy to seek her out for nurturing.
Isabella needed someone to talk to about the grossness of the E.R.: the schizophrenics talking to themselves, the drunk who slept on the floor, and the girl in the wheelchair who pissed herself. She failed to mention anything involving her five siblings, or how she could help her mother while she was on crutches.
“You work with her at Coliseum, right?” said Malaysia. “Maybe you could pick up her shifts.”
“Noooo,” Isabella cried with grand perturbation. “Coliseum be hella gross, Miss Mal. The things we have to clean up at the football games . . .” She shook out her hands like they were drenched in bacteria. “I don’t even think it’s legal they make us handle that.”
“Still,” said Malaysia, “you want to think about what you can do.”
“I’m too busy for all that,” said Isabella.
“Busy with what?” Malaysia asked icily.
“Things,” said the girl.
Malaysia suppressed a scowl. She removed a fifty dollar bill from her wallet and offered it because that seemed the helpful thing to do.
“Only if you need it,” she said.
Isabella considered a moment then accepted the fifty with a mumbled thanks. It occurred to Mal that, instead of going home to attend her injured mother, Isabella might take BART to San Leandro and smoke up with her boyfriend Pablo. Impatient once more, Mal envisioned history as a literal flood pouring past the school, down International and into Fruitvale. She glanced at her watch.
“I hate to cut this short, but I need to go vote.”
Isabella embraced her one last time. After she was gone, Malaysia slumped in a desk and stared at the ceiling.
“Gimme a moment,” she told history. “I’m coming.”
Since this room housed a Science class during the day, she sat surrounded by fox skulls and frozen frogs and nesting hornworms. A Jack-o’-lantern grinned from the teacher’s desk and flyers for community gardens hung on the bulletin board. When she had shown her CD player to the kids they got excited, arguing over who got to carry it on their shoulder and pretend they were the Fresh Prince. Sometimes Mal felt as anachronistic as that boombox, preaching Saul Williams to kids who admired Beyoncé, Jay-Z, Lil Wayne.
And now Obama.
A cold feeling sucked at her gut. During class she could ignore it, but it returned full force: We could lose.
Suddenly her phone vibrated in her pocket. “Whaddup, Nikka?” she answered.
“Have you voted yet?” asked the cool, calm voice on the other end.
“Girl, I been putting out fires at work all day.”
“I’m still at work, too.” Nikka was a high school principal in West Oakland. “My car’s in the shop. Can you pick me up?”
“I’ll be there soon as I can. Did you vote yet?”
“No.”
“Let’s do it together.”
Second disaster: the traffic. Stuck on I-580 in the shuddering confines of her Honda Civic, Malaysia kept gazing at the dashboard clock that said 5:45, paranoid her one vote could be the decider, as silly a thought that was. Searching the radio for early results, she learned that polls had closed in Pennsylvania, white supremacists made a failed cross-country trip to assassinate him, his Kenyan half-brother was proud, Sarah Palin did a photo op with Make-A-Wish kids, Hawaiians were holding luaus for their first presidential candidate. Fluff pieces as if he’d already won. Mal refused to celebrate early. As she waited in her steel box, the clouds unleashed rain so dense it looked like threads stitching the errant earth to Heaven.
“Are you close?” Nikka asked her on the phone.
The Oakland Tribune clock tower appeared like a candle over the trees. “Next exit,” said Mal. “You know voting for the first black president ain’t gonna be easy. We got the ghosts of Confederate generals blocking the highway and shit. I heard Congress just passed a law saying you can’t vote unless you had a great-great-great-grandfather who could read and owned property.”
“Don’t.” Nikka sighed heavily. “No jokes today.”
To little surprise, Downtown Oakland was nearly deserted. Mal assumed most people were huddled around TVs. Today’s count of Obama shirts was seventeen, less than the record (she’d counted fifty-two on the night of the first debate). To reach Thomas L. Berkeley Avenue she navigated the Tetris-piece-shaped streets while rapping along with Nas like she was still a teenager, hoodie up, just herself and the rippling vinyl in those pioneer days when hiphop fit on the human race like a fresh pair of jeans. Energy coursed through her. Call it hope, home, rap, or poetry. Call it a Kenyan and a Kansan brought together to make a golden child.
Nikka was standing on the corner of Berkeley and Broadway under a purple umbrella, gold hoop earring spinning in the wind like fireflies. A regal dark woman in purple fingernails and lipstick, she wore a trenchcoat over a white woolen sweater and a white knit scarf that hung to the knees of her black pants. Watching her run to the car summoned hollas in Mal’s mind.
“Hella Beasty,” the MC would say, “who you sending up?”
“Nikka!” they would holla in unison. And as she adjusted the mic, “Gaw head, queen!” “You so sexy, boo!” “Remember why you wrote it!” “Don’t fuck up, judges!”
A shame Nikka had quit slam to focus on her work. Her poems, lyrical and imagistic, designed to worm into the listener’s psyche and stay awhile, had been perhaps too subtle for the performance-based world of slam, an art form Malaysia loved like she loved black people, a love for something despite its faults. Nikka opened the door and plumped down in the passenger seat.
“Happy Obama Day!” said Mal.
“Ashé,” Nikka replied, wrestling her umbrella closed. “I’m angry.”
“How could you be angry on a day like this?”
“I listened to right-wing radio,” she said through pursed lips. “That was a mistake. The things they feel comfortable saying . . .” She shook her head. “It feels like the 1800s.”
“They mad ‘cause it ain’t their day,” said Mal, braking at the red light. “I’m like, you cracker motherfucker, you get every other day.”
“It was getting my blood pressure up,” Nikka replied. Mal recalled Nikka telling her a week ago, with full certainty, that Obama would lose. She’d heard on the news that Southern gun nuts had been convinced by the right-wing propaganda machine into thinking he would disarm them. Piss off the gun nuts and he stood no chance. Lately Mal ardently wished for her beautiful and brilliant friend to turn off the news. Nikka continued, “And it’s so scary when you consider that McCain is an outlier. In this one speech he did, somebody in the audience called Obama a Muslim. McCain took the mic and said, ‘He’s not a Muslim.’ I honestly feel he’s not hateful enough to be a Republican president.”
A scary thought indeed. The light turned green and Mal floored the accelerator down Broadway.
“Slow down, girl,” said Nikka.
“Can’t let history leave us behind,” said Mal, her eye on the digital hourglass. “We getting that Obama vote.”
“I love your enthusiasm,” said Nikka with typical reserve. “But seriously. Slow down.”
The last time Mal voted she’d almost slept through it. A pillow thrown at her face woke her up. There was Autumn pacing their apartment in cheetah print lingerie.
“Get up,” she demanded. When Malaysia stayed put, Autumn threw a pair of jeans in her face. “I said get up! We have to go vote.”
“Nobody needs to vote,” Malaysia said. She’d worked ten hours at a school in Hayward and needed rest. Autumn looked disgusted, as if she’d found a detestable stranger in her bed.
“What are you,” she said, “one of them anarchist motherfuckers? All you talk about is knowing your history. You know the sacrifices made so we could vote and you’re saying you don’t need to?” She yanked a pair of leggings from the overstuffed closet, causing an avalanche of clothing to fall around her toes. She glared angrily at the heap. “I mean fuck, shit, Schwarzenegger? California is the laughingstock of the whole world.”
“Who do I vote for?” Malaysia asked cautiously, fearful of the mood she was in.
“Vote for Gary fucking Coleman. Anybody but Schwarzenegger. Now stop being such an Ares and get out of bed.”
On the way to their polling place, an elementary school on a quiet street between MacArthur BART and San Pablo Avenue, Mal found herself wishing Autumn was there. Not speaking. Not judging. Just there. Ashamed of this longing, she turned up the radio, news from the other forty-nine states. “Obama is leading in Pennsylvania . . . Colorado . . . Washington State . . .” It was a quarter past six, the sky graying in the east. She parked in front of the open double doors, locked the car behind her with a click of the keys, and hurried up the short steps.
“Hold on,” Nikka called. She was struggling to open the door without hitting the car next to her, got her Manolo Blahnik’d foot out first, then her head, then an arm holding her massive black leather purse. “Girl, you done just locked me in the car.” After squeezing out and gently closing the door, she looked at Mal with pleading brown eyes. “Can we please not run?”
So Mal walked with Nikka down the brightly lit hall to the gym. On the wall hung first grade drawings of Obama, the smiling globular faces suggesting they had used up every brown Crayola. Second graders wrote letters to him. At a glance, Mal could see several of them had asked him to end the war. Others asked him to end global warming. Most were addressed to “President Obama,” as if their teacher was too excited to correct them on the senator’s actual title. On the way they passed a par of blue-aproned women mopping the floor, Selena on the radio. Mal said, “Buenas noches,” and they said, “Igualmente.”
“I like some of Obama’s ideas,” said Nikka. “If it weren’t for the black thing, I’d vote for Nader. If we want real democracy we need a third party.”
“I like the black thing,” said Mal in a petulant tone. “Anybody who say it ain’t ‘cause he black be lying. It’s like, ‘Why you voting for Obama?’ ‘Oh, somebody told me that somebody heard that somebody heard him say he wanted to close Guantanamo.’ ‘Okay, why you really voting for him?’ ‘Um, uh . . . he black.’” She added playfully, “Nader ain’t got his swag. If we voted purely on swag—”
“If this was the swag election,” said Nikka, “Obama would win.”
“Girl, did you see his infomercial? Where he was in the stadium in the end and he came out and Michelle had that look on her face like, ‘All you bitches back off. I got this.’” Signs on the wall pointed their way to the gym. “We finally get to vote for the guy who look like us. That’s all anybody politics be: who they want over they house.”
Or who they don’t want, she thought, recalling the gay marriage ban on the ballot. They entered through the gym doors like newly-made angels through the Pearly Gates. Their Saint Peter was a gray-haired white woman in a tan smock.
“Are we too late?” Mal asked the woman behind the desk. “Please tell us we’re not too late. If we are, I’m demanding a recount!” she exhorted, handing over her driver’s license. “And it ain’t gone be like Florida.”
“You have plenty of time,” said the Democratic poll monitor, bouncing a blond child on her knee. There were ten booths, one of them in use.
Nikka presented her license and sauntered to her booth. It made a grating sound as the curtain swept heavily to guillotine her upper torso. Mal wondered why in all those years nobody had never designed a more comfortable booth. It looked and felt like taking a shower with your privates exposed.
Inside of her personal iron maiden, she stared at the names and levers, daunted, like being the operator of a World War I switchboard and only her quick action would bring reinforcements to the front. Hundreds of people must have touched those levers, and she envisioned illness gestating like fat black rodents on top of them. Searching her purse, she found a Burger King napkin and fit it over the levers like a dental dam.
To prepare for her civic duty, she’d researched every initiative. YES on Prop 3 to fund children’s hospitals. YES on Prop 7 for renewable energy. NO on 9 because victims’ rights legislation hurt defendants, who were overwhelmingly black. At last she came to Prop 8, hesitated with her finger on top of the lever. Anger tightened her throat. That such a bill could get on the state ballot was an evil act. Then she remembered a friend telling her they’d seen Autumn going door-to-door in East Oakland, campaigning against the bill.
Why? Mal wondered, annoyed at herself. Why can’t I vote without thinking of her?
It took some effort, but Malaysia shooed away thoughts of her ex, replaced Autumn with the dreamed-up spirit of Marsha P. Johnson. Looking fabulous in her white fur coat, the honored ancestress gave her finger a gentle nudge on the NO lever.
As far as Obama went, Mal told herself not to think too hard. First black president. But what else? Over the year she’d watched a people’s movement grow around him, exciting yet, at times disturbing. His victory seemed inevitable. But the world protested the war and Bush still bombed Baghdad to the tunes of Sousa, a gleeful die-o-rama orchestrated by grotesque white men. Would they let a black man win? She could hear a curtain grind open and a woman chant: “O-ba-ma! O-ba-ma!” Already she could see John McCain’s lipless grandpa smile as he strode onstage with his sidekick, the psychotic beauty queen. Mal felt set up for another defeat.
Maybe Nader could use the help.
She thought of COINTELPRO and the CIA shipping crack into black communities. From El Salvador to Chile, from Congo to Iraq, from Palestine to Oakland the bad guys won time after time. Her anger called for action, destruction, a billion ululating voices swallowing Earth in a dark-skinned wave. But all she had in the moment was a ballot.
She checked off Barack Obama. Vice-president: Joe Biden. Secretary of State: Hilary Rodham Clinton. “And fuck Dubya,” she said.
When she left the booth, she found Nikka waiting with her fingers laced over her lap, her expression placid, a YO VOTÉ sticker on her lapel. They went for free coffee at Starbucks. They waited in a line that stretched out the door, a horde of Obama supporters come for caramel lattes.
“I think they’ll try to assassinate him,” Nikka said glumly.
“If they shot him, Sarah Palin would do it,” Mal said, knowing the Alaska governor was always good for an easy laugh. “Bimbo would say she thought he was a moose or something. ‘All y’all mooses look alike.’”
She relied on comedy in moments of discomfort. Even with students, she would lozenge her advice in jokes, unlike Autumn, the most serious person she’d ever known. On that day years ago, Mal’s reluctance to vote against Schwarzenegger led to an argument. If you don’t care about Cali, Autumn screamed, then just leave.
That people could show their caring in different ways never occurred to her. Mal wondered what Autumn would have thought about this election—the pageant of black versus white, man versus woman, old versus young.
There had to be a medium between true believerism and cynical nihilism, Mal figured, standing in line at an Emeryville Starbucks. Between her liberal friends who campaigned for Obama and her socialist friends who vocally wanted him to lose. Selective optimism, maybe? Every human around her was so invested in his victory that her caution felt like a betrayal.
With election results still coming in, she knew would get little sleep that night. She didn’t want to be alone. She opened her phone for the list of party invites.