The night of tryouts arrived. I had been practicing in my room every night; my mother encouraged me, told me that I “had it in the bag,” that they would be a fool not to let me in. When she was a child, she didn’t make her cheerleading squad, but then one girl fell ill and she was accepted into the elite. I felt like I was a legacy, that I was destined to follow in her footsteps by becoming a cheerleader and, in the process, I would become beautiful through whiteness. I don’t know what fueled my mother’s desire to become a cheerleader. I never asked because I was afraid that in turn she would ask me the same.
Families lined the elementary school hallways with beach chairs, blankets, and picnic baskets full of food because they knew that tryouts and decisions would all happen in one night. The judges were the cheerleading coaches, those who also taught us all the vocabulary, jumps, and dance routines. My mother and I held hands to pray that God would hold my fear at bay. I knew the dance steps. I’d practiced them while walking downstairs for breakfast and dinner. I’d practiced them on the way to the bus stop. My smile was congealed on my face; I was excited before my moment began. My confidence was so overwhelming, so filling, that I refused to touch any food or drink before it was my turn.
Every white girl walked out of the cafeteria where the tryouts were held with a smile on her face. She hugged her mother, high-fived her, or simply walked over to her spot by some wall in the hallway to relax until the moment of truth. When my name was called, I walked in with two other white girls and the Afro-Latina. The judges, all white women, smiled and welcomed us. Their hands gripped their pens, ink bleeding onto their evaluation sheets. I don’t recall breathing. Once the music began, I danced our routine almost like I was a programmed machine. I just went, my body moving and cutting through the air. I made eye contact to let them know that I was there, and they watched me. When it was time to judge our jumps, the Afro-Latina was the first to go. We were standing on opposite sides of the cafeteria, with the white girls couched in between us. Our order was not intentional, but nevertheless it was significant to me; we stood as poles for the white girls to remain at the center.
The Afro-Latina faltered on her jumps. She forgot what one of them was and stood there with a surly look on her face. She jutted her right hip and began to roll her tongue in her mouth. Oh no, I thought. I knew those gestures well. I’d seen them in my mother and aunt when they were fed up. She was returning to being a girl of color. When she forgot her steps, she remembered who she was in that room full of white women. She was paralyzed.
“Do you want to try again?” one judge asked.
“I don’t know,” she replied. She was not upset. In fact, her expression spoke of exhaustion. There was nothing left for her to do, so she stood there and we moved on.
I knew that I had to be better, not only because I wanted to be a cheerleader, but also to signal to the judges that I wasn’t like her. We might both have had light brown skin and the same wooly-textured hair, but we were not the same. As I’d expected, I did my jumps without so much as wobbling when my feet returned to the ground. I walked out of that cafeteria feeling as airy and euphoric as the white girls. I couldn’t feel my actual body whatsoever. I imagined, I almost believed, that my body had no restrictions. I was limitless, white.
Hours passed as we waited for the results. We had gotten to the tryouts at around six p.m. and didn’t hear anything until about nine, ten o’clock. The cafeteria doors opened again, but this time, the judges were coming out rather than inviting girls in. The entire hallway was silent. I could hear my heartbeat thumping in my ear and an incessant ringing in the other. They called names one by one: white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white, white. White girls hugging their white mothers. White girls surprised at the results, covering their mouths and squealing, “Oh my God.” White girls surprised, white women judges holding back their excitement for their new, and yet old, team. The one judge speaking stopped, and they returned to the cafeteria.
I blinked and a tear rolled down my cheek. One became several. Several became innumerable. My mother spoke with Tanya’s mother and they deliberated going to the administration to “talk about this.” I did not know what “this” meant. Ruby, throughout it all, smiled and gathered her things. As for the Afro-Latina, I don’t believe she and her family stayed until the end. My mother tried giving me a CD to cheer me up, but I could not help but think that something was terribly wrong, not so much with the judges but with me. Maybe I didn’t smile enough. I didn’t recall smiling, but that’s because I had been trying to focus. Maybe I was too fat. Maybe I wasn’t beautiful. That had to be it. Because I was not a cheerleader, I felt like I was sentenced to eternal ugliness.
I got over the results within a few days because I had another kind of drama unraveling in my life. One of my closest neighborhood friends and I were fighting. I do not remember what it was about, but it had to have been something stupid, because what was that serious at ten and eleven years old? The Internet was starting to get popular—more of our fighting happened over AOL instant messaging than in person. We might have typed curse words to each other, talked about each other’s hair and clothes, but there was one comment that brought my fingers to a standstill: “Do you know why you didn’t make the cheerleading squad, Morgan? It’s because they don’t accept monkeys like you on the team.”
This “friend” was Filipina, and several shades darker than me. I had heard rumors that her family was racist and this was why I was never invited into her house, but I’d never thought she was infected, too. After all, she wore fitted hats, dated black guys, and knew the lyrics to more rap songs than I did. She moved through black spaces with so much fluidity that we accepted her as one of our own. But when she called me a monkey, I thought back to the first of those nightly prep sessions. There was no amount of practice or smiling that could obscure the inescapable problem of me being a black girl. Did those white girls look at me as a monkey who had to be treated with artificial cordiality so that I wouldn’t act wild or aggressive? Did I transform into the character of a monkey when I performed in front of those white women, subtly begging for their acceptance without questioning it? Suddenly, I understood more about race than I ever had. It didn’t matter if my “friend” was wrong. I didn’t make the team, and therefore, she knew that I was inferior. Unlike her, who ingratiated herself with black people and moved into our spaces, I could not perform well enough for white girls to claim me as their own. It wasn’t simply because I wasn’t good enough to make the team. I couldn’t make the team because I was not human. And when I looked at myself in the mirror, when I kissed my mother good night, this feeling of being the monkey, nonhuman, haunted me. I should’ve known my place. I should’ve known that when I was around my black friends, I was who I was, and when I was in a white space, I wasn’t afforded humanity. And maybe that was what I was really trying out for, not a cheerleading squad, a chance to be a person. Did I smile to be less threatening? Did I dance to prove that if I kept moving, I could avoid being confined by their preconceived notions of who I was? Just what exactly needed validation?
When I was thirteen years old, my mother’s boyfriend, a revered and well-liked Rowan University professor and psychologist who we liked to call “Z” for short, rose from our leather sofa and bent down on one knee in front of her. I heard my mother’s surprised scream of delight and that was it because I was already on my way back upstairs to hide. I’m still not proud of what I did. She had survived two previous marriages, one marred by physical and verbal abuse and the other by cheating, and a jilting. She deserved all the love in the world, yet I refused to watch it blossom because I knew that my own life in Atlantic County was about to be over.
Z had tenure, but my mother could conduct her real estate business from anywhere. It was only logical that we move closer to the university. After Z proposed and my mother accepted, my older sister Patricia found me upstairs in the bathroom.