Cheetahleader

"My girlfriend likes my hair wet.
She runs her fingers through my coils
as if to straighten them
and pushes her nose against the roots.
“I love when your curls are loose,”
she says.
She is saying,
“I love the white in you.”
-
She teaches me the Kenyan name for people like me,
yellow pawpaw,
bright little fruit.
She relishes the term as if she’s biting into it,
letting the juices run down her chin,
and I wonder if it would taste as sweet
if it were darker.
-
At midnight, I am blow-drying my hair,
stretching the curls out as far as they can go
and willing them to stay.
My girlfriend leans against the bathroom door.
She says,
“You should see my sister. She’s blacker than…”
She searches for words.
Finds one, squeezes it.
“My sister is coal.
She’s darker than all of us. We told her
she was adopted from South Sudan,
like a refugee.”
-
I am not as yellow as my girlfriend wants to believe: Of all my friends,
I am the blackest.
They are a Starbucks menu of colors ranging from
tall creamy cappuccino
to venti milk with a drop of coffee.
They are fractions.
Half white, half black.
Half Samoan, half black.
Three-fourths white, one-fourth black.
Polish and Cherokee and Irish and Russian
and, oh yeah, black,
black at the end,
like a punctuation mark no one uses anymore.
-
After she meets them all for the first time,
my girlfriend laughs at me in the car all the way home.
“You made me feel bad for calling you yellow,”
she says,
“but look at your friends.”
I ask what’s wrong with my friends.
They’re black.
She says, “Barely.
And you want to be like them.
You want to be black, barely.”
-
She says,
“You wouldn’t have gone natural if your hair looked like mine.”
-
I don’t answer.
The car reeks of a chemical evergreen smell
from the Mother Africa air freshener
that swings  from the rearview mirror,
unsure of where to go.
I bought it because Jamaican incense
gives us both headaches.
-
My girlfriend folds one leg up to her chest
as we pull onto the highway,
and says,
“There’s a reason you only date African girls,
Caribbean girls.
What did you call them?
Girls with slits for eyes and checkmarks for noses
and hip gyrations like earthquakes.
You are terrified of being regular black.
Why are you addicted to the hyphen?”
Her nails dig into her stockings to yank out knots.
“What are you running from?”
-
The next day, I get braids,
and she stops running her fingers through my hair."