Mad, Mad World

My niece and my dad have this game they play -- sometimes to the chagrin of the other adults in the room. He leans down to her level, smiling, says, "Jada, POW! Right to the moon," and fake sucker punches her.

She never grows tired of it. They'll play that game off and on for hours, to the point where the game has faded, as has my dad's energy, and it's just a jubilant child scrambling around the room, yelling "POW!" and giggling and laughing.

Four-year-olds have little sense of repetition. Jada will watch the same movie a dozen times. It doesn't matter. Children don't have much concept of time. That's why they're always late, no matter what it is. The other reason: Cable TV cartoons.

But she picks up on patterns. She understands that Event A links to Effect A and so on and so on. She's smart enough to connect the dots -- occasionally in a logic that has a sort of simple brilliance to it.

Her father has been in Iraq, since the spring. Jarvis is a Marine. He has been ever since I've known him, when he married my cousin in '99. (You might be asking, "Wait, I thought you said she was your niece?" Well, legally, she's my second cousin. But for practical purposes, she was, is and always will be my niece.)

The two of them started building a life. Jarvis and Nikki (Ada). They started the great journey toward middle class security: an apartment. A cat. A dog.

No one I can recall spoke of children. This was probably because she's white and he's —GASP— black. I had no idea at the time how simultaneously important and irrelevant something like that could be. I just wondered what their kids would like that.

Now I realize that question was on everyone else's mind, too. Sort of. I was thinking of the genetic, physical child. Would it be black? White? Mocca? Chocolate? I think the rest of the family saw it in a more abstract manner. It wasn't about the color of their children; it was about the color of their lives. Would it be cookie cutter suburban White? Would it be urban? Could they straddle them both?

Then again, one uncle could see nothing besides skin color. He damned Jarvis based on it. The pot calling the kettle black? Actually, it was more like the convicted white felon calling the upstanding black man evil.

And never seeing the irony. They never do.

But the Andersons had obstacles. The military transferred him to Japan and, to avoid staying for several more years, she stayed behind in Ohio. It was tragic, in a way I didn't understand then, a way I'm just beginning to grasp now.

They had their first child, Jada, in 2003. She was this blob of moving and crying parts, like a doll come to life. She entered the world, oblivious of the family celebrating her birth. And of the family quietly ignoring her. She was, of course, the product of something unnatural and vile, a biracial couple. She was the great-granddaughter of a woman who refused to acknowledge her for quite some time, the same way she refused to speak Jarvis' name after the marriage.

Jarvis returned from abroad. The world rejoiced.

The new family moved to Virginia, right outside of Washington. He had an office job, and she worked for a doctor. They had made it; they'd found their security in the heart of the nation's capitol.

But he was a Marine and the country was already in one war while preparing for God knows how many more. It was almost inevitable. Before that, though, the family uprooted again and moved to North Carolina.

And Jada started to grow. We needed new pictures every few months: Halloween, birthdays, Easter, Christmas. The picture in my wallet kept changing. The picture in my head of a rambunctious rascal intent on savoring every last drop of attention never did.

As I said, Jarvis left for Iraq (not by choice). Nikki locked up the house in North Carolina and moved back (temporarily) to Dayton, where they live now.

And what I said before about Jada's simple brilliance: she once asked if they could go back to their North Carolina home. To see her daddy.

If only it were really that simple.