The Story: Fading

I grew up on the south side of Chicago in the late fifties, sixties, and early seventies.  There were no drugs, gangs, or poverty in my neighborhood.  My father was a doctor and my mother was a housewife.  We lived on a quiet tree lined street of brick bungalows.  I attended a Catholic grade school and an all girls' high school.  I was sheltered, but sheltered from what?  You see, I was black and all that I saw with the exception of nuns, priest, and grocery store owners were people black like me. Chemist, teachers, lawyers, doctors, butchers, policemen, the list goes on, were the fabric of our neighborhood. Perhaps I should qualify that by saying that black like me meant, frequently, a person of mixed race appearance.  We were the last vestiges of mixed raced descendents of white slave masters.  Of course, I was not aware of this at the time.  We were not the norm, but we were certainly not an anomaly.  I grew up thinking that all black people were middle class, Catholic, and not unusually, mixed looking.  When I went away to college, I naturally gravitated to other students of color.  Some occasionally teased me about my color and social class, but I never felt completely alienated by other blacks.  White people were foreign to me.  It was not so much their color, because many of my friends and family looked as white as them, but the sense of distance and aloofness.  I was twelve before I realized that both of my next-door neighbors were black.  I thought they were white because they acted much like the only whites I had ever encountered.  They were decidedly cool, and distant to my siblings and me.  I did not judge race by the color of your skin, rather, by a person's attitude or affect.

Like most upwardly mobile blacks in the seventies and eighties, I went to graduate school, married, and decided to pursue the American dream of a home in the suburbs.  I momentarily hesitated choosing a nearly lily white suburb, but I thought the schools, and community amenities off set the issue of being one of the few blacks in the neighborhood. Gradually I became aware of how much a fish out of water I had become.  While visiting a nearby park, another young mother asked what kind of doctor I was, when I had never mentioned I was a doctor.  Word had spread that there was a black doctor family who moved into the neighborhood.  My children were invited to other children's birthday parties, but when I arrived to get them, mouths would drop.  They did not realize that my kids were black until they saw me.  Gradually, they were no longer invited over to some children's homes for play dates or birthday parties.  I began inviting my 2nd and 3rd cousins kids over for weeks at a time during the summer so my children would see and interact with other children of color.  It helped but was not enough.  We joined 'Jack and Jill,' a historically black social club for children and returned on Sundays to the south side of Chicago for Sunday worship, but it never seemed to be enough.  I tried hard to instill a sense of pride of being black, but with so few playmates who were black my children didn't really understand my message.  I remember a sorrowful day when by daughter was watching a movie about Huck Finn.  As she watched a scene where a white overseer was beating some black slaves in a field, my daughter broke down and cried.  She said she no longer wanted to be black because black people got beat.  The pain I felt, as a black mother was indescribable. What made it worse was the fact that if my daughter wanted to, she could one day decide to be black or white.

If she or possibly her future children chose white, than I would fade into a closet.  How do you instill pride with so many negative messages?  Once, while my daughter was on a school bus one of her classmates pointed out some 'bad' words written on a seat.  The child told my daughter, "I bet black kids wrote that."  When my daughter questioned her logic, the child explained, "Because black people are bad." 

I removed my children from the suburban schools, moved back into the city and put them in more progressive private schools.  There were a few more students of color at these schools, but it was still predominantly upper class white.  My daughter started to experience another kind of prejudice, black on black haters.  She had long, straight blond hair whereas the other black girls had short hair.  One in particular, lashed out at her and told my daughter that the only reason she had "white girl's hair" was because her grand-mother (I think she meant ancestor's) were raped by white men.  Wow.   My little girl came home hurt and confused because she didn't know what it meant, but knew it sounded shameful or bad.  She became the brunt of pranks, teasing by the other girls of color.  She began to experience a phenomena that I was not aware existed, at least not while I was growing up.  I call it "you're not my black."  Both my children were not openly or readily accepted as being black by other black children.  They not only didn't "talk black," they also didn't "look black." At the "black table" in the dining halls at school if they would sit down at them, they would get the "what are you doing here?" look.   In my neighborhood growing up, my friends were all ranges of color, many as light as my children.  Everyone was accepted as black.  It seems today, with the advent of desegregation, the concentration of mixed race blacks who aren't the product of one white parent and one obviously black looking parent, is now an anomaly.  It's easier to assume we're Hispanic or Middle Eastern.  Although white students seem to accept my kids as being "mixed" (but not really black), they are more curious and persistent in wanting to know how they are mixed.  But even then, often they "forget" that my children are black, and again, sometimes with painful consequences.

America has created us, but now no one knows what to do with us.  I don't consider my family as mixed, because both parents are black.  And 'mixed' isn't a race anyway.  Yet it seems we are becoming less and less accepted as 'really' black, by younger generations.

Whether I 'fade' through my children marrying white people, or 'fade' by the gradual perception that 'mixed' is no longer accepted as black, the result is the same.  If you walk like a duck, quack like a duck, and look like a duck… are you really a duck?