Color Me In
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2019 by Natasha Díaz
Cover art copyright © 2019 by Bijou Karman
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Díaz, Natasha (Natasha E.), author.
Title: Color me in / Natasha Díaz.
Description: First edition. | New York : Delacorte Press, [2019] | Summary: Fifteen-year-old Nevaeh Levitz is torn between two worlds, passing for white while living in Harlem, being called Jewish while attending her mother’s Baptist church, and experiencing first love while watching her parents’ marriage crumble.
Identifiers: LCCN 20180447991 (print) | LCCN 2018052933 (ebook) | ISBN 978-0-525-57824-6 (ebook) | ISBN 978-0-525-57823-9 (trade hc)
Subjects: | CYAC: Coming of age—Fiction. | Racially mixed people—Fiction. | Prejudices—Fiction. | Jews—United States—Fiction. | African Americans—New York (State)—New York—Fiction. | Family problems—Fiction. | Harlem (New York, N.Y.)—Fiction. | New York (N.Y.)—Fiction.
Classification: LCC PZ7.1.D499 (ebook) | LCC PZ7.1.D499 Col 2019 (print) | DDC [Fic]—dc23
Ebook ISBN 9780525578246
Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Author's Note
Acknowledgments
About the Author
For my Vovó and Pa,
Zuleika Ivelone Vaz Andrade Santos Thomas
&
David Meserve Thomas.
Without your courage to love one another despite all the odds,
I wouldn’t be,
and neither would these words.
Prologue
One. Two. Three. Four. Six. Seven.
Squirrels dart back and forth across the park, so I count them, anything to distract myself from how bad I have to pee. The line is taking forever, but I’m not going to have an accident, not when we finally made it up to the front.
“Excuse me?” a syrup-sweet voice asks my mom as we shuffle an inch closer to the tire swing. “My daughter is riding the swing alone too, and I’ve got to take the roast out of the slow cooker….I was wondering if they could go together.”
“Sure,” my mom agrees.
The lady bends down to me, meeting my gaze with Cinderella-ball-gown-blue eyes.
“Well, aren’t you just the prettiest thing?” she says. “How old are you?”
I look up at my mom for permission to talk to a stranger. She nods.
“Six,” I say, holding up the fingers to confirm.
“Five,” my mom corrects.
The woman laughs like we told the best joke in the whole wide world.
“They’re such a riot at this age, aren’t they?” she says.
“Sure are,” my mom says, remaining friendly enough not to be rude, but monosyllabic so as not to invite further conversation.
The lady points at her daughter. “That’s my Samantha,” she says. I see a small, pale girl whose light yellow hair is so fine it looks like silver thread in the sun.
“They’re only a year apart. Maybe I could get your number for a playdate? I so need a break sometimes. How long have you been nannying? She is so well behaved; her parents must love you.”
The lady talks a mile a minute as she rummages through her bag, unearthing pacifiers and baggies filled with Cheerios.
“Aha!” She holds up an index card with crayon all over it and writes her name and number before handing it to my mom.
The line of exhausted parents waiting behind us starts to grumble; it is our turn. The woman hoists Samantha onto her shoulder like a rag doll and walks past us to put her on the tire.
My mom crumples the index card and it hits the ground like a dry leaf. She begins to walk toward the swing, but I don’t move. This isn’t the first time someone has said my mom is my nanny. In fact, it happens so often that I have begun to get concerned.
“Mommy, are you really my mommy?” I ask, distressed.
My voice projects much louder than I intended, and everyone in the park turns to stare, even the blue-eyed lady. Their eyes burn through my sweater like angry moths and I lose the last bit of control I had over my bladder. Hot pee trails down my legs as I shake, terrified as to what my mom’s answer will be.
My mother’s golden-brown skin glows, illuminated by the sun that streams through the branches of the trees overhead. When she bends down, I see her lips quiver. She cups my face and her thumbs rub my soft, whitish cheeks, as if the gentle sweeping motion is all I need to clear the pain away.
“I’m your mommy,” she says.
And then she drags me out of the park before I get a chance to ride the swing.
Chapter 1
I have lived trapped in that moment ever since.
In the dreaded ambiguity
That follows me everywhere I go.
Even here,
In this grimy mirror,
and bitter fluorescent glow.
The electric hiss, like bees caught in a plastic casing, sends shock waves from the sterile lightbulbs in the bathroom of Mount Olivene Baptist Church. The sound travels over the damp off-white tiles, back to my reflection in a mirror so streaked and blurred with soap scum my skin almost blends
into the walls behind me. If it weren’t for the burst of brown freckles that swarm around my nose and across my cheekbones, I’d be the way I am most of the time: invisible—swallowed up whole by the imaginary bugs and the all-encompassing beige.
Cloudy Pepto-Bismol-pink gel squirts onto me like projectile vomit from the rusted soap dispenser and sends a foamy streak across my light yellow shirt. I go to grab a handful of waxy paper towels piled up on the side of the sink and bump my phone and church program, which I’ve covered with poetry scribbles, sending them to the ground.
“Damn it!”
My shout echoes through the empty space and I stand with my eyes pinched shut, ready for Jesus Christ to float into the ladies’ room and smite me for using foul language in his house. But no one comes. The organ upstairs begins to play, accompanied by the choir. They drag these hymns out for like, twenty minutes. Four sentences that repeat over and over and over, gaining in volume and excitement and conviction with each go-around.
Take me to the water
Take me to the water
Take me to the water
There to be baptized
This is the song before closing remarks. I need to get moving before the Gray Lady Gang rushes in here for their weekly gossip session, which, for the record, is way scarier than the reincarnation of the lord and savior.
Every Sunday, the posse of eighty- to one-hundred-year-old ladies shows up in matching skirt suits and refined wigs, ready to talk shit and bully folks in the name of Christ. The whole congregation knows that they kick out anyone who dares use the bathroom during their regularly scheduled meeting with a swat of a cane and a glare so rigid that their victim is liable to cross over right here in the bathroom.
“Did you see what she had the nerve to wear today, Eveline? She’s a two-bit hussy, if you ask me. Stuffed into that getup like a breakfast sausage…”
Their raspy voices rush under the bathroom door with the breeze from the fans in the hallway. I’m too late.
Currently, the talk of the town is Miss Clarisse, a woman in her sixties who owns a clothing boutique that specializes in form-fitting, outlandish attire best reserved for ’90s Lil’ Kim videos. She is back on the prowl for love after her fling with Pastor Davis ended abruptly a few weeks ago—the Grays threatened to circulate a petition for his retirement, deeming it inappropriate for a community leader to be seen with her in public. Miss Clarisse isn’t exactly helping her case, showing up to church every Sunday in outfits so tight it’s a miracle when she doesn’t pop right out of them.
Their murmurs move closer, so eager to dive into the juicy updates that they can’t even wait to get inside the room. The pounding from their thick heels against the floor counts down to our impending faceoff. I have to save myself.
I burst through the door just before they arrive and walk past them without making eye contact as I rush to the stairs.
“Humph!” grunts the oldest and roughest GLG member, Miss Eveline. Her straight, chin-length black wig sways ever so slightly under a wide-brimmed lavender hat adorned with netting and an embroidered silver rose.
“They can’t be satisfied takin’ our houses, now these white folks got to come up here into our churches too?” Oretha, a light-skinned woman who is the tallest and spriteliest in the bunch, asks.
Miss Eveline smacks Oretha’s hand with a guttural “Shush!”
“That there is Nevaeh, Pastor Paire’s granddaughter,” Miss Eveline says. “The Jewish one,” I hear, before the bathroom door closes behind them with a sharp click.
Chapter 2
I quietly enter our row with my arms crossed over my chest to cover the gigantic wet spot. Anything to avoid attracting attention.
Stand. Clap. Praise. Sit.
Every week it’s the same. I could handle the idea of church on special occasions, but every Sunday? My dad believes organized religion is for people who are weak and lazy, which is why they would rather listen to burning bushes and holy ghosts for direction than to logic. For the most part, Daddy only claims his Jewishness as an excuse to avoid spending time with my mom’s religious Baptist family or to get his own mother, who goes by “Bubby,” and tries to force us to go to temple all the time—sometimes under threat of death—off his back.
“It’s not about being Jewish, honey. It’s about being a Levitz,” he says after he pulls Bubby off the proverbial ledge and sends her home in a cab. I always try to ask him, “What does that mean? How can I be a Levitz without being Jewish?” But he just shakes his head and changes the subject. After a while, it got easier to not even try to figure it out.
My phone lights up in my lap. The screensaver I set up is a slideshow of photos chosen at random. This one is from a year ago. I should have deleted it. We were barbecuing, and my dad teased my mother by waving a chicken wing in her face. (She hates them, but I can’t understand why—they are so delicious.) He chased her around with it and we were all laughing.
“Ow!”
Clawlike nails plunge into the back of my arm. I put pressure on the angry half-moon indents on my pale skin, punishment for having my phone out during services. Sundays used to be fun and easy and dependable, but that’s all in the past now. Since my parents’ separation, nothing is the same.
Stand. Clap. Praise. Sit.
Done.
A sharp voice accosts me.
“Nevaeh, are you hungry? I said, are you hungry?” my auntie Anita yells, repeating herself for the power effect.
Auntie Anita is bossy. She has three kids and says if you aren’t direct, nothing gets done, but I think it’s just in her nature to tell people what to do. She and my mom couldn’t look less like siblings if they tried. Anita’s skin is darker than my mom’s golden brown, and she is almost five inches taller, not to mention the half foot added by the pile of twists that sit in a perfect heap on top of her head.
“Corinne?”
The natural crevices that outline each muscle under my aunt’s deep brown skin are on display as she grabs my mom’s shoulder.
My mom sits beside us with her head in the clouds. She’s petite, only five foot three, but regal. Her hair is pulled into a tight ballerina bun without so much as a baby hair out of place. Her eyes keep wandering down to her hand, where she fumbles with her wedding ring. I get it. I had braces for a few years, and mid-conversation my tongue would just drift over them like a magnet—there’s something about that mixture of metal and rubber covered in slimy spit. It’s weird, but the constant motion soothed me.
“Girl!” my aunt yells, failing to pop whatever bubble my mom is lost in.
Death would be less painful than the embarrassment from the glare of every person in the church as my aunt, irritated, sucks her teeth so loudly that the angels in the stained-glass windows join in on the judgment.
“Come on, let’s get Pa out of here before these old ladies smother him to death with their questions. It’s not like he’s got a direct line to Jesus. Nevaeh, go find your cousins and walk back to the house. It’s our turn to drive Miss Eveline home, and Lord knows we won’t have room for you all with her electric wheelchair in there.” She charges through the parishioners, dragging my mom along toward Pa’s shiny smooth head.
My grandfather stands out among the wide-brimmed Sunday hats and colorful silk scarves donned by the gaggle of women who listlessly wave paper fans around their faces, fighting off the deadly forces of menopause and global warming.
“Nevaeh, how you doin’ this Sunday?” Miss Clarisse intercepts me in her bright red pleather pantsuit. Her unseemly character was no doubt the cause of my aunt’s quick departure.
I smile and silently fight my urge to look down at her cleavage, which jiggles with each word that rumbles out of her.
“I’m fine,” I whisper.
“Damn, you’re quiet!” she yells through a wave of people who shake their heads as th
ey walk by.
She takes me by the shoulder and spins me around.
“Why don’t you come down to my shop? We’ll get you into some fine dresses and have you look real nice for church next Sunday. Your mama’s taste is a little…dry after living in the suburbs with all those white folks for so long. Bring her with you and we’ll get you both some attention from a brotha.”
She smiles, but her voice betrays her desperation. Her shop is thirty years old, and the storefronts around here are getting picked off and sold one-by-one to the H&Ms and Zaras of the world.
“All right,” I say, and allow myself to get caught up in the crowd.
I’ve got to keep moving. My cousins, Janae, Jordan, and Jericho, always sit with the youth group on Sundays, at the farthest end of the room.
“Nevaeh!”
Jericho, who goes by Jerry, is always excited to see me, as if I didn’t just move in with him a couple months ago. His mini-fro bobs along with him as he makes his way toward me to give me a hug. I squeeze his cheek. Jerry recently went through a preteen growth spurt, but it turned out to be horizontal rather than vertical.
“Jerry, can you get Jordan and Janae?” I ask. “We have to walk back.”
We turn to the crowd of kids who orbit around my older fraternal-twin cousins, protecting them like keepers in a quidditch match. Jerry looks at me, terrified.
“Fine, I’ll do it. Stay here,” I say, irritated and anxious as I walk toward them.