Take Her Man. Grace Octavia

      Do’s: Cry if you want to, dance until your feet hurt, wear a dress so skanky you can’t wear underwear, have your friends pretend you’re a celebrity, smile at every man you see, and let everyone and their mama know you’re a free agent.

      Don’ts: Party at a place special to you and your ex (bad memories), drink too much and pass out singing “End of the Road” by Boyz II Men, or call your ex…ever, ever, ever.

      The Babbling Bourgeois Baboon vs. the Democrat Octoroon

      In the car on the way to Justin’s, I couldn’t stop thinking about Julian and trying to figure out where our thing fell apart. How did we even get to the “Troy, I need a break” breaking point? Being honest with myself, I had to admit that the relationship was no cakewalk. Julian and I had shared some hard times and disagreements. Most notable, of course, was the time Julian invited my parents to meet his parents. (Note: Why in the hell would this man want our parents to meet if I wasn’t his “girlfriend”? And he says I was the confused one….) Anyway, though I was excited about the parental union (seeing as how it usually led to other unions), I should’ve seen that train wreck coming down the tracks from a mile away.

      The highlight of that night came when my mother, a rich girl gone artsy after her divorce from and remarriage to my father, called Julian’s mother a “babbling bourgeois baboon” and stormed out of his parents’ Harlem brownstone.

      That insult occurred after my mother wasted what was left of a perfectly full glass of red wine—something I’d never seen her do before—on his mother’s Persian rug. The drama all began when our parents started talking politics during an after-dinner chat. I need to correct that—they started talking black politics. Let me explain why this distinction is significant. My dad, a retired international pilot, couldn’t give a damn about much else other than his money, me, his money, where he’s traveling to next, his money, whether he has to take my mother with him, his money, and his mother (my Nana Rue) and her money, which someday will be his money. Ask him about the war in Iraq and he’ll pull out his BlackBerry and measure Iraq’s distance from Morocco—his vacation destination of choice; ask him about starvation in Africa and he’ll bring up his trips to Dubai and how well he pays the cleaning lady at our vacation home there.

      Dad’s goal in life is to not get his “pressure up,” and the man has never had high blood pressure, so I guess he’s doing a good job. Since he retired, Daddy spends his days playing accountant and keeping the two ladies in his life (my mother and his mother) smiling and out of trouble. This disposition fared well on his good looks that had yet to begin to fade even though he was far into his fifties. Standing at 6’2” tall, my father had deep mahogany skin, and even though his eyes were browner than anything I’d ever seen, they shined with hazel flecks that guaranteed he’d catch a few double takes from women in any crowd.

      My mother is one of the most outwardly confused people I know. The “drama with mama” was endless, but most of the time we all put up with it because we knew the source—her past. See, my mother was born to one of Manhattan’s black female socialites in the 1950s. Only my grandmother wasn’t really black with a capital B, as in “Black and proud.” Grandma Lucy was mixed. As was her mother before her, her mother before her, and her mother before her—you get the picture. To make a long story short, this twisted past led to my mother (the child of Grandma Lucy’s marriage to a white man who didn’t know my grandmother’s race until he proposed marriage) having serious issues wherever race was concerned. In contrast to what one would think, she turned out nothing like Grandma Lucy. My mother hated the idea of passing and the privilege it seemed to provide her with as the sole heir of the son of a Texas railroad tycoon. The importance Grandma Lucy placed on color, brooding over my mother’s dusky tan skin whenever the sun was high and insisting that my mother was “lucky” to have inherited my grandfather’s straight nose, rose-strained cheeks, and straight blond hair, ate away at her. Sometimes I felt as if my mother was always standing in between the lines of her color—the light side and the dark side. She was too afraid or embarrassed to embrace her light skin for all that it meant to Grandma Lucy, so she kept her blond hair dyed black, frowned when someone praised her light hazel eyes, and always seemed to feel a need to shower people with dark skin, including my father, with compliments. She wanted people to know that she was Black (with a capital B), she was down for the people and not, as they say, still passing.

      With all that in tow, fast-forward about twenty-five years and you have my mother sitting in Julian’s parents’ brownstone. Two doctors who came from generations and generations of old Harlem doctors, they believed in self-determination and every man for himself achieving the American dream. Julian’s parents were staunch Republicans. They had money and they wanted to keep it…period. After listening to them share their political philosophies over many dinners in the past, it was clear that they felt that the more poor, ignorant black people there were out there, the less they had to worry about losing what they had.

      My mother, who really didn’t have to work or go to school, for that matter, hated Republicans and specifically despised black Republicans for what she called “their nerve.” I know it sounds contradictory, but it was simply the kind of position my mother’s affluence and color afforded her. She didn’t have to worry about people taking what she had or to complain about higher taxes paying for government programs. There was an endless supply of railroad money in her life. She couldn’t spend it all if she tried—I would give that venture my all if someone would let me. But with that kind of good old American money comes a certain amount of shame. Somewhere between her lunches at Saks with other wives and days at the spa, my mother peeks out onto the streets of New York and feels bad for folks who have less than she does, folks who didn’t benefit from the history of having a passing mother and rich father. This empathy, I mean sympathy, leads my poor, guilty mother into the barrios—the ghettos—each weekend to do her part by painting houses with her sorority or the Links. Do good. Give back. It’s all a little pathetic, but hey, other people get to benefit from it.

      Needless to say, my mother’s a Democrat. So on that precious night at Julian’s house, the two of us had two Republicans (Julian’s parents), a man staring