The walk up the long, gravel drive was precarious in the heels I’d chosen to wear, but I was twenty-four and clueless. Having only been to weddings in Reno, Nevada, where mustached men in giant belt buckles and women in chiffon and strappy sandals were the norm, my knowledge of the appropriate attire for a formal, outdoor wedding in the South was scant. This led to me wearing two-inch heels too narrow for my feet, a strapless dress whose bodice had to be hiked up every five minutes, and, most questionably, a bejeweled headband that I wore like a crown. It was my third day in Hartford, Arkansas, with my boyfriend, Brett, and the first day without a drop of the summer rain that had been hammering the town. I imagined the bride and groom claiming the mild weather as their own personal blessing from God on their special day.
Being in Brett’s hometown felt like borrowing someone else’s nostalgia. We’d been dating on and off for nearly six years, and his stories of growing up felt like my own memories now and again. I looked at the areas we drove by with a soft ache in my throat, as if I knew what it meant to belong to these places and then leave them behind. Brett and I had the kind of romance that flatlined and reanimated in a dizzying cycle that both tired and thrilled us. This time felt different, though. Our relationship seemed stable in a way it had never been. He was bringing me home for the first time, introducing me to his family and closest friends.
Brett held my arm to steady me as we made our way across the loose gravel toward the sound of chatter coming from the lawn beyond the gate. Once we joined the party on the terrace, I was introduced to the people of Brett’s youth, exchanging handshakes and earnest smiles, tossing around compliments about dresses, the venue, the happy couple, and the cooperating weather. We were a stilted but amicable bunch, oozing perfume and politeness, attempting ease in the Arkansas humidity. Like the others, I kept my voice soft and my laughter light, as if the air itself were delicate and one guffaw could damage it and cause a storm to spill open.
I saw the man’s pink tie in slices—through crooked elbows, in the narrowing gap between two women hugging, flashing momentarily above white tablecloths—as he jostled his way toward us. I could tell his step was determined even from the corner of my eye. He reached our group wearing a humongous smirk and dark sunglasses, and he skipped all the typical pleasantries. No “Hey, Brett, good to see you!” or “How’ve you been, man?” Instead he threw his arms up and exclaimed with his big teeth bared, “Brett brought a Black girl!”
My skin prickled. Brett brought a Black girl hung in the heavy heat, growing thicker, stickier, more suffocating by the second. I grasped for how to react, like I had the time when, as a camp counselor, I’d been hit on the head by a wayward ball during a discussion with my campers. I remember their wide, expectant eyes as I recovered from the blow: Will she laugh? Will she cry?
A few of the guests standing near us shuffled nervously and laughed. I heard my own hollow chuckle as I waited for the man to follow his declaration with something other than an ear-to-ear grin. I don’t remember what happened next. Maybe Brett clapped him on the back and changed the subject. Maybe an usher broke the spell, nudging us to take our seats. The truth is the moment was over as suddenly as it had happened, though I would stay suspended in it for years, trying to get unstuck from my reflection in the man’s dark glasses, trying to muster a different reaction.
I walked in a trance to my folding chair on the lawn. Everything around me had a color, and that color was white: white chairs, white tablecloths, white faces. It was the same color I’d grown up with back in Reno; there was just more of it here. I hadn’t paid much attention to it when we’d arrived because I’d had a lifetime of practice doing just that: not paying attention.
I was a Brown girl raised by a Black father and a Filipina mother, but I was brought up with whiteness. White people were my classmates, friends, coworkers, neighbors, and lovers. I spent most of my formative years so immersed in whiteness that I stopped seeing my Blackness—like a drop of coffee diluted in a bowl of milk. Slowly I convinced myself that I was one of them, that my skin color didn’t matter, that my Blackness went unseen. My delusion became my dwelling place, a giant bubble filtering the world through its iridescent lens.
Somehow my bubble went unpunctured for twenty-four years, allowing me and my coffee-colored skin to arrive in Hartford, Arkansas, blissfully ignorant of what my Blackness might mean in this place.
I sat in a daze through the first part of the ceremony, the words of the man in the pink tie still ringing in my ears. What do you do with words that have hollowed you out? Where do they land? My mind was like a video player, rewinding the moment and trying to analyze it frame by frame. Brett brought a Black girl. How easily the words had rolled off his tongue. Alliteration is not simple to articulate, let alone deliver in a way that knocks the breath out of a person. Had he practiced on his way over? Which word did he place stress on? Was it brought? Black? I don’t like truncated statements; where was the rest of it? Surely there was more to follow. Brett brought a Black girl. How could the laws of syntax allow that to be a complete sentence?
My mind returned to the ceremony in time to watch the bride’s sister, Kate, walk down the aisle. In the car on the way to the venue, Brett had told me Kate was the most popular girl in their high school. Once we’d arrived at the wedding, I’d felt myself scanning the crowd for her, trying to guess which one she was.
Now, as she floated by, the crowd hummed with approval. Christina Perri’s “A Thousand Years” played in the background. My usual reflexive eye roll at the overdone song didn’t kick in. Instead I allowed myself to become captivated, to let this beautiful woman with gold ringlets streaming down her back command my full attention. It wasn’t the first time I’d been mesmerized by a white girl. My body held the memory of all the times I’d practiced observing them growing up. I knew how to watch girls like her without being caught, how to study them from afar, examining their every move: the way they flirted and ran their fingers through their hair; the way they strutted through space, the world bending to their touch, showing them how fully they belonged.
“There she is.” My mind formed the words just as Brett spoke them aloud. The sound of his voice brought with it the memory of his silence on the lawn. Maybe silence is too strong a word. What do you call the sound of a man with nothing to say? Surely he’d tried to say something in the wake of his friend’s comment? Surely There she is were not his first words since that terrible moment? They couldn’t be. I wouldn’t allow it. That would put a knowing in me that I couldn’t unknow.
After the ceremony I made a beeline to the bar and downed a glass of wine before rejoining Brett for the reception. Close friends and family of the wedding party got to sit inside the manor’s grand dining hall; the remaining guests were seated beneath a large white tent outside. Brett and I found our names on a poster board framed by eucalyptus: we’d been placed in the tent with a group of his childhood friends. Brett made a face that I knew meant he was disappointed in our table assignment. I decided not to remark on how juvenile it all felt, how I could see the high-school dynamics playing out—the question of who gets a seat at the cool kids’ table. He wouldn’t like knowing that the thought of him being uncool had crossed my mind. I slipped my hand in his as we made our way to our seats.
The evening became more enjoyable with each glass of wine I drank. By nine o’clock I had become a permanent fixture on the dance floor, along with some other women from our table. Brett was not a good dancer—his body was all extremities and ninety-degree angles—and he would never publicly do something he wasn’t good at. So I danced mostly on my own. Under the spell of chardonnay the world began to feel like a painting left out in the rain. The edges of people’s faces lost their sharp contours; the distance I’d kept between myself and the others had been swallowed up, leaving me sweaty and clinging to the skin of strangers; the lights looked like stars, and the stars looked like us, shiny bodies orbiting the night as one. That is, until I closed my eyes to the colors in front of me and saw only a violent streak of pink.
Someone yelled that it was time for the farewell, and everyone rushed to the front of the manor, where we were each handed a sparkler. I’d never lit a sparkler before and didn’t know there was a technique to it until a stinging sensation on my hand told me that I’d done something wrong. I’d held the sparkler at too sharp an angle, allowing the burning portion to touch my skin for several seconds before I registered the pain.
Maybe it was all that wine, or the adrenaline from dancing, or some desperate need to avoid making a scene in front of these people’s searching eyes, but the pain felt small in that moment. I shrugged it off with a laugh when Brett, seeing me wince, asked what had happened. Lit by the frenetic flicker of the sparkler, we peered down at my hand, the crescent-shaped mark playing out its own angry drama, flaring from pale pink to a deep reddish-brown with each bright spasm of light.
“It’s not that bad,” I said, passing him the lighter.
Neither of us knew that, in a few hours, the pain would become unbearable. That we’d have to stop at a drugstore on the way to the after-party to buy burn cream. That at the party I’d keep my hand against a glass of ice water because it would be the only relief I could find. That at the end of the night, when Brett and I were having sex back at his stepmom’s house, I’d hold my hand up to the ceiling, above the rise and fall of his shoulders and out of harm’s way.
