American Chica_ Two Worlds, One Childhood - Marie Arana [120]
An African-American friend of mine, Carol, once told me that this happens to blacks in a white culture, too: You talk like a white in the workplace, like a black in your neighborhood. You use two dialects, two personalities, two senses of humor, two ways of shaking a hand, two ways of saying hello—one for the world you’re trying to make a way in, another when you’re home with your kin. Now, Carol was a very sedate woman—elegant in bearing, cautious with words. I came upon her unexpectedly one day as I elbowed my way through a party: There she was, in a group of black women, swiveling her hips, flinging her hands, carrying on in another lingo, so that I hardly recognized her. She laughed about it later, but I could see it was nervous laughter. She confided that she’d always thought that whites who saw her in her other context wouldn’t understand it. She worried they wouldn’t trust her when she resumed standard English, they might conclude she was insincere. I mentioned the linguist’s monograph. She and I agreed that, however different our backgrounds were, the fear of being called a faker, an impostor, had meaning for both of us.
But the monograph doesn’t begin to tell the story. The truth about biculturalism is more complicated. That others doubt you is not the point. The doubt creeps into you, too. What Carol was saying was that not only did she fear people would think her a two-face, she was confessing that she was afraid she was. I understood it, because I, too, had doubted my own trustworthiness. I had been fooling people for years. Slip into my American skin, and the playground would never know I was really Peruvian. Slip into the Latina, and Peruvians wouldn’t suspect I was a Yank. But even by the age of ten, I had gone one giant step past Carol: I was flitting from one identity to another so deftly that it was just as easy to affect a third. I could lie, I could fake, I could act. It was a way for a newcomer to cope in America. You can’t quite sound like your schoolmates? Never mind! Make it up, fashion a whole new person. Act the part, says the quote under my school photo, and you can become whatever you wish to become. Invention. It was a new kind of independence.
MOTHER WAS IN such a festive mood, settling into our new home on Tulip Street, that she didn’t seem to mind that I had been made to stay after school and write Halloween costumes are not supposed to harm my friends one hundred times on the blackboard. She was so cheerful about the three floors of rooms, the two-piano salon, our part-time cook, even the piles of frozen apples in our backyard, that she dismissed O’Neill’s venom as little more than a schoolyard spat. She read my teacher’s note about the importance of a safe Halloween, slipped it into a drawer, turned to my painted face, and asked where the blow dart was. “Here,” I said, drawing the bamboo quiver from inside my poncho. She hung it back on the wall.
“What you did was wrong, very very wrong, but I think you’ve had all the flogging a green-cheeked jungle girl can stand,” she said. “Come, I want to give you some pie.” I whooped, threw my arms around her waist, and dragged her into a tango until she giggled so breathlessly I had to steady her with the kitchen counter.
I spent a winter trying to do things the O’Neill way, although I never would have admitted it. I studiously avoided words like book or butcher, gorged on Wonder Bread, wailed with Chubby Checker, wheedled a pair of loafers, scored a perfect attendance at Calvary Episcopal’s Sunday