The skin I'm in

It's been a tough few weeks in our two towns.  A number of extraordinary curricular missteps regarding slavery (a mock slave auction and runaway slave posters presented in two separate schools' 5th grades) and pathetic racist and anti-Semitic scrawls and scratches on the walls of some of the elementary, middle, and high schools in the area have risen from the ground like a septic spill and gotten everyone all up in their feelings.  Myself included.  As the black mother of two black girls of mixed heritage, I have become both the sounding board and the rubber wall off of which white friends and acquaintances can bounce their feelings, their fears, and their embarrassment.  I have read posts on a town Facebook page and gone down the dangerous, thorny hole of defensiveness, divisiveness made more infuriating by a focus on semantics and description rather than on empathy, connection, and apology.

In navigating my anger and my hurt and the confusion and fear of my girls, I have struggled with what has always been my belief, my truth, and with the hope I have wanted to instill in the hearts of my children.  We have paid lip service to the idea of community in these two towns.  We have congratulated ourselves for our openness and inclusion, and with a bit of side eye and tongue planted firmly in cheek, I have allowed it, but the truth is, no matter that I am married to a white, French man, I have not ever believed that the collective "white people" are my community.  I have always felt that my otherness would never allow me space in "their" communities.  That sucks and I hate to admit it.  But I have always been prepared to be disappointed by even my allies.  I have been prepared to lose them, to let go, to be assaulted, humiliated, abandoned by my white friends and colleagues.  I have steeled myself for their indifference, their insensitivity, and their ignorance.  The events of these past weeks have triggered that sense.

My otherness, my black, my skin/culture/race has placed me outside for much of my life because I grew up in the mostly white township of a mixed town in which most of the people of color lived in the borough circling the town.  Defining and defending my otherness within this community became my job, and one that I was not particularly good at because I was a child and because my parents had grown up with only black people and really had no idea what these white people were getting into.  They may have known in theory but had no practical application of growing up and living amongst the very people they'd always expected would not include them.  We'd been given no tools other than "do unto others" and watching and studying their white moves on TV and in real life.

Though surrounded for much of my young life by pink and tan little girls and boys, I always marveled at my brown skin.  It was coppery and gold when the sun hit it and shiny with oils and lotions after a bath.  It amazed me that my mother all butter cream and café au lait could blend with my father's coffee bean and chocolate to make the different browns that covered my siblings and me.  My grandparents, save my dad's father, were all fair-complexioned black folks.  My mom's mother was often mistaken for white for those not in the know (white people).  The skin we were in made us black people, all of us because one drop made it so*, but there was not shame in that, not instinctually.  Only one thing could make it immediately so to young me, could blush the brownest cheeks mauve and purple.  And that was the dreaded slavery section of American history in social studies.

All the lessons and stories told by our families, the reunions, the family trees, old photos, black church, roof-raising hallelujahs could not inoculate me from the burning eyes of my peers and my teachers who needed me to feel some kind of way, show some kind of reaction to their gaze when they told me that it all began here.  With someone with the same coppery skin as mine or dark coffee bean of my father or buttercream meringue of my mother or white coconut of my grandmother sold into or born into slave to toil and suffer abuses named but not discussed, certainly not felt.  We'd move past fast enough to keep the pain and the anguish at bay.  I'd burn and blush, feeling my cells vibrate with that truth in my body and my classmates would consider it for as long as it took, usually the slowest reader, to get through those two paragraphs.

That the enslavement of my ancestors is abhorrent is not and was not questioned.  That my family tree and the stories of my past are filled with tales of horror, rape, assault, abuse, beatings, degrading humiliation, division and separation of families and names never to be traced again (and further receding as each older member of my family, those who kept the stories and the secrets alive, pass on) isn't either.  But it is not quite understood either.  So hideous is this reality to all of us in these United States, the modern world really, that we refuse to sit longer than a few paragraphs with it.  Refuse to share the reality of our foundation, of the roots of this nation with our future.  Allow our children to interpret what we as parents can barely discuss with one another.

I asked my girls last night to consider this.  We are sitting together in a room, spending time after a long day when we are brought outside to the yard and told by our master, the person who owns us and uses us for his will, who keeps us in this cold house in these horribly tattered clothes, that tomorrow, he will send my oldest daughter to another family where she will work and toil for the rest of her life, and that we will more than likely, never see one another again.  I tell the youngest that years later, the same will be done to her.  I tell them that we suffer and that we cannot read or write, have no comforts, and cannot escape this truth as our lives, as what we will live and endure as long as we are on the earth.  I tell them that the same would have been true for those who came before us and those who came after. 

As I talked, we were all in tears.  I was choking them back as I described to them this horrific scene.  This one horrible moment that does not include epic cruelty, rape, maiming, whipping, torture, starvation, actual breeding of human beings like chattel.  I cried into their hair as I hugged them and said, "This is not the story of where black people began.  We are and have been so much more.  This is how the story of us begins for so many white people.  This is slavery and it's not all that we are." 

When I heard about the mock slave auction that was to be included in the presentation of a child in my 5th grader's switch class, I at first tried to logically connect the dots that would lead a child to this place.  How in the teaching of slavery did going on the auction block seem like a schoolyard game or play?  How did kids end up dancing and dabbing while singing Negro spirituals learned during Black History Month while pretending to be slaves?  How did children feel compelled to participate in this charade?  What had they missed?  My daughter was doing a report on the Southern colonies and while she mentioned slavery as it is not possible not to, she and her partner met the topic with the gravity one would expect.  To be honest, I could feel their fear around talking about it together.  And that's the problem. 

It's fear.  It is always fear.  Looking at one's self directly in the mirror, facing the truth about one's nature, one's motivations, one's soul is incredibly hard work.  When it doesn't look pretty, we don't want to be who we are.  When I look in the mirror, I cannot deny my brown skin and the history it tells.  I can no much cover the blemish of the world's slave trade with concealer and powders as I can the truth of our history that predates that scarring and the advances and re-centering of ourselves in our own narrative rather than in peripheral characters in a white story.  I'm looking and I see myself.  I see our brown and black and meringue and cocoa and peach and tan skin.  I see our tales told on my body, feel them run through my veins, taste their breath in my soul.  I stare into my tired, knowing eyes and I refuse to meet this moment with shame.  The shame is not mine to claim.

My purple blush at my family's history, my people's story relegated to a 1/2 centimeter on the world's timeline.  The story of the soul-crushing, body-breaking, psyche-wounding, intentionally cruel, inhumane centuries of torture on the people of the diaspora told as a Disney tale with singing and dancing and runaway slave posters drawn by 5th graders and then defended as childhood innocence, has knocked the wind from me.  That forty years after I was taught this hideous tale as my truth, my children and their white counterparts are learning it as though history lives outside of our bodies, outside of the bodies and lives of real people is a travesty. 

Perhaps my anger is getting the better of me.  Perhaps it is about time.  I have sat idly, quietly, cautiously, listening to mostly white people, but also other minorities, with a different story to tell.  I have seen various groups "become" white, claim white, be deemed "model minorities" and turn their heads from the mirror, no longer seeing their otherness in the reflection but a clear, unblemished patina of respectability one foundation shade lighter and rouged lips telling the same stories about black people and the lies of our brown skin.  I hear them all describe and define and explain anything and everything but the privilege their white skin, their acceptable otherness has allowed them.  I hear them demand that I, that we, promise that we are greater than the story of us that starts with slavery, that their othering of me/us is not my/our fault, that their othering of me/us is not THEIR fault, that we can discuss the man in the mirror but that they cannot be made uncomfortable and even more, that THEIR children cannot be made uncomfortable.  So my children look in the mirror and have to ask and I have to tell them every time and yours, only when they get in trouble and we can hope they "learn from it."

And so we sit again discussing slavery, the very root of the systemic racism in the United States of America that has and does threaten our role on the world stage with the rise of Donald Trump and his white throngs terrified of looking in the mirror and seeing themselves clearly.  To see that there are many shades of foundation to cover their pain, their blemishes, their scars, their hate, their privilege, their lies, their denial but that we know they are wearing makeup and that the emperor has no clothes.  You are too scared to look deeply past your white cheeks, your furrowed brows, your clenched fists, your pursed lips to see that you cannot blur the reflections of the people standing next to you, that no matter how you try to fade us from view, we are still standing next to you.  

There were meetings of a coalition on race and there was a town hall meeting.  There were "teachable" moments and recordings of bias attacks and petty crimes that were dissected on the towns' Facebook page.  There were cries of "not me" and pleas not to "see us as just white people" and reminders that "no one living now was/is a slave owner."  And I begin to burn in my own skin, to itch, and to fidget.  I am hot, heated, but not from my own shame.  It is because I must ask again that you look at your folded hands, bite your tongue ready to lash out with explanation, stare into your eyes in the mirror or those of your children and tell me, again, that we can all learn from standing on the auction block, that white children participated too, that the runaway slave posters really had a purpose, that you have more to say and still no time to listen because your discomfort of confronting our hideous past is worth more than our sustained and repeatedly opened wound.  It is because I blush purple with hurt while you do all you can to avoid seeing your cheeks flushed by your complicity in this racist system.  It is because we are teaching our children what we learned and what we learned was not good enough.  It cannot be that I know this just because of the skin I'm in.




*The one-drop rule is a social and legal principle of racial classification that was historically prominent in the United States asserting that any person with even one ancestor of sub-Saharan-African ancestry ("one drop" of black blood)^[1][2] is considered black (Negro in historical terms). This concept evolved over the course of the 19th century and became codified into law in the 20th century. It was associated with the principle of "invisible blackness" and is an example of hypodescent, the automatic assignment of children of a mixed union between different socioeconomic or ethnic groups to the group with the lower status.  (Wikipedia, One-drop rule).



(c)  Copyright 2017.  Repatriated Mama:  Back to the Suburban Grind.

Hair raising

I cut my hair down to the quick because it was getting on my nerves.  This week.  A few weeks ago I cut it down to the skull because some new product that promised to strengthen the short hair I did have on my head not only did not strengthen it but caused it to become brittle and dry.  I sheared it off to start over.  I'd been threatening this all summer, a massive cut, because I just could not find myself in the style that my slow-growing coif was presenting, and I wanted edgy, androgynous, strong and felt more like Dorothy Hamill mushroom or short-haired newscaster safety helmet.

I've given up on long hair. For me.  When we lived in Barbados, my hair grew like a wacky weed due to the climate, moisture, water, and raging hormones I produced due to the recent arrival of my second babe.  I wore it long and loose, top-knotted, with braids, shells, twists and left in the sand, conditioner, salt water (rinsing only the chlorine), and let the sun bleach it out.  This was a me I never imaged.  Super feminine, sexy, and girly.  Only now can I admit that I was gorgeous--sun-kissed, toned, long-haired.  I had headbands and rubber bands, barrettes and buns.  I put flowers behind my ears and looked so demure and precious that I felt like a character.  It was fun, truly.  But when we got back to the States, all that hair threatened my time management and the style (mostly a bun or a ponytail) made me feel undefined and misdirected. 

Since I was in seventh grade and a beauty school fuck-up destroyed my hair, my confidence, and my life in one afternoon's attempt at the ill-thought but insanely popular Jheri Curl, my hair has been short.  I want to say that I took to it effortlessly, but that would be a flat out lie.  I cried my face off for months as my pimply, awkward, pre-teen chubby face was forced to take center stage at just the moment that I wanted to wait in the wings.  I wore a headband for years, afraid to let the hair just be, hopeful that it would grow long and full and I'd be able to poof it to heaven like all the other 80's vixens (black and white).  It never dawned on me to wear a weave or a wig, they'd never have suited me, but I endured my wide open face on display with a tortured, simmering hurt.

My girls have hair down to their shoulders.  The oldest has the most beautiful mane of auburn, blond, and chestnut hair that coils and twists and extends from her skull out into the world.  When she wears it down, which is not often, she stuns.  She has no idea of the power that head holds, and not just because of the hair.  She struggles with the kinks and the knots and the fullness, but I have promised her that she will come to love it.  She's a Leo and I've told her that she will walk the world like a lion one day and will love her unruly curls.  For now, she wears it pulled back in a ponytail or bun.  My youngest has dark brown hair with auburn highlights.  Hers is wavier, thinner, and she loves it in side ponytails and topknots.  Her cascading locks makes her look older than her six years.  She's glamorous and girly and sweet.  She often wonders aloud if I want longer hair, if I want to wear ponytails, or if I "like" my hair short "like a boy."

I do.  Like it short like a boy.  This is my familiar style.  But it gives me no protection.  There is nowhere to hide and nothing to make me beautiful on days that I am not.  When my hair is short, super short like it is now, I have doubts and cannot slink under my bangs or wipe my hair back behind my ears.  When it is short like this I have to hope that a wriggle of my nose or a twitching of the corners of my mouth or a flutter of my eyelashes doesn't give me away.  With my hair short like this, anything and everything can be betrayed.  It was once just my feelings but now it's my wrinkles, my changing hormones, my sprinkling of greys which seem to show up better when my hair is worn close to the skull.

As soon as my hair is cut, I begin the process of starting to grow it back.  More as an exercise in its ability to still do that, grow, than in hoping I get locks flowing to my shoulders.  The truth is that it just doesn't grow like that.  There are people whose hair grows like weeds, a little water and light and the garden flourishes.  Not mine.  This is a black girl's story, and one that I will not tell with any fresher perspective than it has been previously told.  My hair, because of the way it grows, because it is coarse and kinky, does not grown like silken threads, returning in months to pre-cut lengths.  Mine can take years and breaks with frequency.  The growing out sometimes leaves me frustrated and I run to the scissors.  I can't wait.  I have no judgment or loathing of myself because of this truth; I have resigned myself to it.  The struggle is real.

The girls' hair, both some combination of my kinky, scrappy, nappy curls and my husband's fine, sweeping curls (of yesterday as he is now suffering from some level of hair loss that only occasionally strikes him as a horror) grows just fine.  Mine has always needed coaxing.  Oils and creams and potions.  Wraps, conditioners, and special combs or brushes.  It takes its time.  And I wait.  Until I can't.

Little girls with short pixie or asymmetricals, tight Afros or blunted bobs make me smile.  The gender specific styles really influence the littles and anything that runs counter to that makes me beam.  A friend has a daughter who brings her short cut, gold earrings, Star Wars, long shorts game every day and I call her my avatar.  To bring it like that, as a baby boo, is so epic.  The amount of judgment and projection that goes onto the shorn head of a woman or girl is pretty massive.  Sometimes even I can't bear the weight.  Yet she's all the way in and wondering what's wrong the folks who don't get her vibe, her style, not the other way around.

My crowning glory has to be my aura and not my hair.  My halo is in the ether and not on my head.  And though I sometimes have to shore myself up for each morning, each moment I pass the mirror, each time I reach to push my hair out of my face, and while I like my hair short, and have grown to love it over the past 30 years, I have never felt so seen and so naked.  I imagine that people can see through my skin into my heart, can read behind my eyes, can see my thoughts, so I run my hand over my head...but it's still gone.  I know it's not the hair.  The hair doesn't really supply the power.  It doesn't really protect or shield and it doesn't really make me more beautiful or more feminine.  I don't even really look like a boy.  But I have wanted to hide, to disappear, to go away, be invisible and unseen.  I've seen my youth and my wide-eyed wonder recede under that skull cap of a style.  I've seen my face loom larger, my eyes keener, my lines and wrinkles lightly tracing where I laughed and smiled and cried and picked.  I've seen my face lurch forward with something I'd not realized was there before.  Experience and wisdom.

I know things and I will not hide it.  I can't.  Because my hair is cut short to the quick and the truth is written all over my face.


(c) Copyright 2015.  Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.


Addendum:  This is my journey with my hair.  There is no judgment-stated or implied-for how others choose to wear their hair.  It has been a lifelong process for me, dealing with this hair, and what the styles say to society at large, but I am at peace with it.  Except for when I'm not.