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By Root 472 0

a bit like him, because his ancestry was the same: His mother was mostly Anglo-Indian, his father mostly African. This mixture gave you really good skin, he thought, vainly admiring his own, and medium bushy hair that was actually manageable. His hair was long and, released from the braids he usually wore it in, hung nicely down his back. Some of the other mixtures could cause a couple of bad hair days. He smiled, looking for his suntan lotion. Not suntan. He always forgot. Sunblock. Horrible, that now humans had to block the rays of the sun. But hey, with his mixture, he got a whopping dose of natural sunblock, from his dad: Thank you, Mother Africa! While from his mom, not to leave out her European contributions, he got a nice reflective quality. He imagined the too strong sun rays bouncing off the mica of her white genes. All things considered, he didn’t expect to suffer from skin cancer.

His mind was like this. Running on a lot of the time about himself. He tried to hide this sometimes from Kate, but she only laughed. Most people are like that, she said. We are our most interesting subject. When we’re free to think about ourselves, not about the kids, not about the car, house, or payments on our various purchases, and not about our work, well, guess what? We natter on about ourselves.

They were both vain. And what do we have to be vain about? they sometimes asked themselves. We’re considered second- and third-class citizens of a country whose government never wanted us. Except as slaves. We understand by now the world will be blown to bits, doubtless by this same government, before people of color get their fair share. We can’t afford health insurance, nor will it even ever be applicable, the way things are going. Nobody but us wants to be Black. And yet, we’re vain.

We like our stubbornness, Yolo had offered.

Our contrariness, said Kate. We never want to do anything the way they do it. We think that of any two choices given they are likely to pick the most boring one.

We like being brown, Yolo said, nose-kissing her underarm. A choice they could have made easily except it frightened them. What did they do with the brown offspring they had? They sold them. What a message to send your kids, of whatever color.

And yet, “sold down the river,” his great-great-grandparents and their parents before them had somehow survived. Though how they’d managed to live without their mothers he simply could not understand. As old as he was the thought of losing his mother, for any reason, including old age and readiness, made him want to cry. Africans were said to be the most attached to their children of all peoples the Europeans encountered. You could make the mother especially do anything by threatening to harm her child.

And our unique hair, said Kate. Do you realize everybody else’s hair, on the entire planet, is straight?

Well, compared to ours, he’d said, laughing and kissing her graying locks.

At last he was blissed out on the beach, The Mists of Avalon in one hand, a gin and tonic in the other. Kate had given him another book to read called Shark Dialogues, a book about, as she put it, The Real Hawaii, but he had left it in his room. The sea was azure enough to make you weep. He was in paradise. If only his woman was with him and not off in some jungle probably by now trying to communicate with a snake.

In this relaxed, bemused frame of mind, he dozed.

Hey, bradda!

Slowly and reluctantly opening his eyes he saw a very large man. Brown with a protruding belly. Dark eyes and long wavy hair. He was wearing frayed denim cutoffs and that was all. He looked like . . . Damn, he looked like something Yolo had not seen since coming to Hawaii. He looked like maybe a Hawaiian.

Hey, bradda man, for want you come oba deah. The man was pointing.

What was he speaking? Yolo dragged himself out of the land of gin and pleasant dreams and squinted toward the end of the beach where the man was pointing. He could see nothing.

What is it? he asked. What can I do for you?

The man seemed surprised.

Oh, he said. I thought . . .

Yolo