With the Fire on High by Elizabeth Acevedo

 

Love

Since I miss her so much, I pick up Babygirl from daycare even though it’s an extra half hour each way when I go there after school. Mamá Clara is super sweet and can’t stop showing me Babygirl’s artwork and finger paintings and all the little dresses she uses on her dolls. I haul Babygirl onto the bus and let her sing to me.

“She’s such an adorable child,” an older white woman says from across the aisle. “Your sister?”

I smile at Babygirl. “No, ma’am. My daughter.”

The smile fades from her face but mine stays right where it is. I’ve met this kind of woman before. The kind with real strict ideas about what makes certain people respectable. The kind that gets sour-faced at learning Babygirl is my daughter, but who would have sympathy if I was of a paler complexion. The kind that looks at Angelica’s colorful hair and calls her ghetto under her breath, but thinks a white tween with purple cornrows is charming and creative. She looks like the kind of woman who will break a stereotype down the middle and hold one half up for white kids and one up for black ones. And maybe I’m stereotyping her, too. Pretending to know what kind of woman she is because of the kind of women who have hated on me, and Angelica, and all the black and brown girls we know from home; who have shaken their heads and tsked their teeth, and reminded us we weren’t welcome in their part of the city, on their side of the bus, in their world.

The smile stays on my face. I nuzzle Babygirl. Just the two of us. We can make it if we try.