flash fiction

She stood at the sink, washing her hands and checking her hair in the mirror. The frizz was back, frizzing without forgiveness, showing her true origins, giving zero fucks for all efforts otherwise. The natural-born kinks were more significant than the hundreds of dollars spent straightening her locks into whiteness and conformity — no amount of water on her hands could smooth or remove the traits of her lineage. Cue the self-loathing and the forced sense of belonging she'd spent two decades creating. As only truth can reveal, Cassie's hair straddled the two worlds of her story; the one she chose to assimilate into and the birthright she abandoned. Ru Paul's, Supermodel vibrated throughout the club while Cassie smoothed the naturally crimped hair that framed her face when she heard a booming voice beside her say, "Don't deny your sisterhood!"

Ouch. Being called out by a stranger in a public bathroom was not something she expected. Moreover, the stranger in the restroom was not far off but instead centered upon the whole truth and nothing but Cassie's island roots. When she turned toward the voice, Cassie was face to face with an individual who, by all accounts, had perfected their craft of honest self-expression. Adorned in boas, radiating confidence, the drag performer embodied self-acceptance. How perfect. Right time, right place? Who knows. But for Cassie, it was a poignant reminder of personal wounds and the conflicted sense of belonging she had struggled with since leaving her island home for the mainland many years before that night. And as the performer walked away, repeating the advice, Cassie shifted back into the revelry of the night out with friends tucking away the trigger for another day.

Days later, the drag performer's words rattled through her thoughts like a jingle on tv, each time with an added phrase that cut through carefully installed insulation around her heart. Layers falling open that felt impassable kept Cassie bobbing and weaving through the timeline of leaving the island, living with a racist parent, professionally relaxed hair, and straight-up wisdom doled out by a drag queen in a Midtown nightclub. Earworms in her head like, "Don't deny your sisterhood; you don't belong here, island girl." "Don't deny your sisterhood the way your father does." Over and over again, the message was clear, don't deny the truth. Cassie wanted to feel free and confident, wholeheartedly herself, curly hair and all. The truth was hard in the deep south, and Cassie only ever learned how to sustain the lie that began with family.

It was early in the '80s when Cassie left her island home and moved to mainland America with her father. Although she lived on islands that were American territories and was an American citizen, she was treated like a foreigner. To her, Savannah, Georgia, felt like a stone's throw from slavery and king cotton. The contrast to her island home, where all races blended without hesitation or misgiving, was the hardest for Cassie MacNamara to accept.

On her first day at her new school, another student asked if she were a mulatto. It was a stunning moment for her to hear someone use a word she'd learned in history class as offensive and archaic. "I'm a MacNamara," she replied. The questions never stopped; a new and harsh word was part of the equation each time people inquired about her ethnicity. But the worst came from her father, who one day introduced her as his "gingersnap daughter." It began with family.

The ridicule endured at the whims of her father for the sake of getting laughs was painful. As a teenage girl, Cassie was ill-equipped to handle the cruel attention. He was different on the islands; he married an island woman and had a child with her. Cassie never heard him use racist slang, and never before was she introduced as anything other than "my daughter, Cassie." Since moving to Savannah, he changed and reframed his character to match the lay of the land and the racist expressions of his new friends. Without a parent to guide, support, and encourage her to be true to who she was, Cassie took the path of least resistance and hid in plain sight. Her first task, deny her heritage.

Like her father, Cassie became a social chameleon; he changed to elevate his ego while she adapted to survive. Cassie dropped her island accent and adopted a southern swirl to mirror her environment and peers. She flattened her curls with hot irons and lightened her complexion with makeup. It was easier to blend in than to stand out as herself. Assimilating became her forte, and for years though she never felt like she truly fit in anywhere, it never occurred to her that the lie and denial of her origins had anything to do with her struggles. Her performative whiteness was so natural that she believed it genuine. It took two snaps and a twist from a drag star in a queer bar to usher in awareness— her truth was already out. Cassie's path to redemption and wholehearted expression began that night in 1995. Over the next decade, she unpacked, edited, and released the burdens of pretense and unhealthy connections with people who didn't accept her.

Over time, what began as something to consider evolved into a self-acceptance-or-bust mission; Cassie's healing freed her and her frizz in profound and bouncy ways. It's easy to move when the weight of shame and opinions of others are no longer center stage. As an adult woman, she successfully allocated resources to support her road home to her purest essence of being, embracing her place in the world as a mixed-race West Indian woman. And much like the story goes, when a couple of clicks of the ruby slippers liberates Dorothy, Cassie frees herself from the mindset of unworthiness and finds her way home. She had the power all along.