One year later, I met the man who would become my husband. He loves every ounce of my 156-pound, five-foot-five-inches frame. And we have eaten plenty of bacon cheeseburgers with our two children during our twelve-year marriage.
Vici Howard-Prayitno
Mother-and-Son Moment
We know that we are beautiful.
Langston Hughes
I can remember the look that he had on his face. So young, cute, innocent and a creation from me with God’s help, of course—a true miracle indeed. A blessing that is worth more than anything. I’m talking about my son. I’m talking about raising this little guy as a single mother into a responsible black man.
One day my son caught me by surprise when he came to me and asked me a question. It was a Saturday morning, and I was busy typing away on my computer as I always do. I could hear the Saturday morning cartoons on in his room, which was right across from my bedroom. And here this little guy comes. Face still needs to be washed, eyes big and alive, with his black and gray Batman pajamas on, one pant leg higher than the other.
He says with his arms folded, “Mommy, why am I black?”
I could still hear myself clicking away at my keyboard, when what this little four-year-old boy had just asked me caught my complete attention. My eyebrows raised and I stopped what I was doing. I looked at him. And we were both looking at each other.
I sat straight up in my chair and said, “Baby, why do you ask me that?”
“Well, Mommy, my friend at day care said white is better than black. He said his daddy told him so. So I wanna know why God made me black?”
At this moment I could feel the anger slowly overcoming me. However, I stopped it in its tracks. I looked at my son, and I just shook my head as I took hold of his little hands.
“Baby, white is not better than black, and black is not better than white. We all are the same, just with different colors. Like your box of crayons, there are a lot of different colors but they are all in the same box. God wanted to make different colors of people. So he did. He didn’t want to make everybody the same color because that would be boring. Don’t listen to everything everybody says. Some people may not like others because they are a different color, but that’s mean and that’s not right. God loves us all. Nobody is better than anybody else. Even our hands, we all have different colors. This is a good thing, not a bad thing.”
I stopped there, just to see what his reaction was.
He looked at me with his eyes still big, and he said, “Okay, Mommy, nobody’s better than anybody else. God likes black people and God likes me. Okay, Mommy.” He started to leave, then he came back. “So is that why Elmo is red, and the Cookie Monster is blue and Kermit the Frog is green?”
I smiled at him, “Yes, that is why.” What could I say to that sort of reasoning?
Hours later that same day, I went into my son’s room to see what he was doing. He was very quiet, which was not usual at all. What I found left me speechless, to say the least. My emotions were mixed between, should I get mad? or should I compliment him on getting the point?
My son had drawn different colored hands all over his wall—red, blue, green, brown, orange. . . . I looked at the wall, keeping my emotions balanced, because I knew it had to be cleaned sooner or later. My son had never drawn on his wall before. Okay, on his dresser drawer, but not his wall.
As I stood there looking at these little small hands all over his bedroom, he tapped me on my side. From behind his back my son pulled out two pieces of paper. One was black construction paper with a lot of little white hands on it, and another sheet of paper was white with a lot of little black hands on it.
My son said, “Look, Mommy! Look what I drew. Look at my two papers. I wanna take them to my day care tomorrow and show my teacher and friend.”
“That’s good, baby, you do that. I like your two papers,” I answered, leaving the wall out of it, still in shock and not yet sure how to handle it.
“I like them, too. I have to teach my friend and his daddy the truth.”
I watched him as he went over to his little backpack and proudly stuffed the two papers inside.
I shook my head laughing to myself as I walked back into my bedroom thinking, Kids are so smart. My baby is so smart. Why not, I’ll let those hands sit on his wall, just a few days longer.
I thought about what happened for the rest of the day. Another job well done as a single black mother, I thought.
Tinisha Nicole Johnson
Black ’n’ White Snapshots
Every day of my life I walk with the idea I am black, no matter how successful I am.
Danny Glover
A few years ago, I was listening to a radio talk show hosted by one of those irritating conservative “shock jocks.” The subject was race relations. Everyone had an opinion, especially a white caller named Sam from San Jose. His complaint was that blacks were too preoccupied with race. His advice: Try not thinking about race for twenty-four hours. He was convinced that if blacks could experience a day without worrying about race, we would all be the happier for it.
I laughed to myself, thinking, Is that what white folks really believe? That we just sit around thinking about race?
What that caller didn’t understand is that for folks of color, living with race isn’t a choice; it just is. The fact is, I would give anything for the chance to go through twenty-four hours without being reminded of my skin color and all the assumptions and misconceptions that go with it.
Sometimes those assumptions are of my own doing. After years of expecting the worst, and often getting it, I see racist ghosts where there are only innocent shadows.
More often, though, race comes roaring into my daily life uninvited like a heat-seeking missile. Some days I am amazed at my swiftness in dodging its impact. Other days I’m slow to respond and find myself bruised and knocked off balance. The blows are rarely fatal, but the built-up scar tissue becomes painful over time. But then there are the funny moments when we get a glimpse of our own ever-ready shields and are forced to set them down and laugh.
It was one of those lazy Sunday afternoons: I had dozed off on the sofa under a pile of unread Sunday papers. Suddenly I hear the kids’ voices getting louder and angrier.
Oh, I moan to myself. They’re at it again. For weeks my thirteen-year-old son and eight-year-old daughter have been fighting constantly. I push down deeper in the sofa, deciding to ignore this spat hoping, if I stall long enough, my husband will intervene.
My ears jump to attention when I hear my daughter wailing, “I am light. I am very light.”
My heart starts pounding after I hear my son shoot back, “You are not light. I don’t know where you got that impression. You’re anything but light.”
I immediately go into my whack attack mode. I jump off the sofa, newspapers flying, rush past my husband who is standing in a nearby hallway, and burst like a bull into the TV room, pointing my hands at two very startled children.
“In this house, we do not make judgments about skin color. It doesn’t matter whether you’re light or dark. We are all beautiful African American people.” By this time I am practically hyperventilating.
My two children look at me like I truly am a crazed woman.
My son speaks first . . . slowly, as if he is talking to someone who has lost her mind. “Mommmm, I am just telling her to get her heavy behind off my foot.”
My daughter chimes in, “And I told him that I’m not heavy. I’m light. I am light, right, Mom?”
But my thirteen-year-old son isn’t going to let me off the hook so easily. After all, how many times do you get to make your mom squirm?
“So, Mom, you want to tell us why you’re lecturing us on what it means to be good African Americans?”
As I am trying to find a graceful retreat, sounds of my husband’s snickering in the adjacent room quickly evolve into huge, bellowing laughter.
I manage a weak apology and mumble something about “You shouldn’t tease your sis
ter about her behind,” and make a hasty exit right to my husband who is now doubled over laughing.
“You could have stopped me, you know.”
“And miss you make a fool out of yourself?” he says. “Are you kidding? It was one of your better performances.”
Judy Belk
I’m Coming Out
To think that I denied hip-hop so that I wouldn’t lose my status as a member of the “popular” crowd in a high school full of gun-toting, dip-chewing, blue-eyeliner wearing children makes me sad. At the time, I was a die-hard U2 fan (still am today) and made bold declarations that hip-hop, this new music that was drawing attention to my blackness, would die. I thought that by rejecting the beats that I secretly danced to as I heard them seeping from my brother’s bedroom, I could prove that I was just as good as all the white kids that I went to school with in Marietta.
The problem was that my skin color (light and questionable as it is) and ability to follow an eight count better than most were stereotypes that they used to measure my suspected blackness. The more stereotypes they could check off their lists, the closer I would move from eating with the “in crowd” to moving to the “colored” table in the lunch room.
This music had to die. It was ruining my social life. It was 1985, and I was hoping and praying that it would all be over by the time I was a senior.
Things didn’t look good. In 1986, DJs started scratching my favorite Tears for Fears song, “Shout,” into the mix of popular hip-hop songs. I was doomed. I couldn’t hide the fact that this music started to move me. It started to excite me. I wanted to come out. I loved hip-hop! Should I out myself and show the world that I was a black girl posing in a white girl get-up, usually in the uniform of a cheerleading outfit? If I came out, I could lose everything: my white boyfriend, my popularity as “A team” cheerleader and my elusive position as “weird-looking” girl.
I wasn’t ready to come out yet, even though I was diggin’ the Salt and Pepa remix of “Push-It.” I knew every word.
Then, on top of everything, my younger brother became a huge break-dancer. He was in the papers and everything. We had the same last name. It was okay to ignore him in the halls at school, but I couldn’t ignore the headlines he was getting. High fives in the hall. Newspaper articles. People started to ask questions. Our “head cheerleader” asked me point blank, “Is that break-dancer your brother?” I sheepishly replied, “Maybe.”
Cut to 1987. I am a senior in high school and have been named “dance choreographer” with none other than the two other black girls on the cheerleading squad. I made sure to keep my contact with them to a minimum because otherwise everyone would look at me as, well . . . black. But the music of Dougie Fresh’s “The Show,” Run DMC’s “Walk This Way” and The Beastie Boys’ “Brass Monkey” brought me closer to these women. We “snaked” and “wopped” our way to being one of the best cheerleading teams that year.
I bonded with these girls. We shared cultural traditions like dancing our dances, braiding one another’s hair and talking about things in our community that only a young black girl would know. I never confessed my “blackness” but hid behind “mixed” identity labels that kept me feeling safe. I will never forget the knowing looks in their eyes that told me if I wanted to come over to their side, they would be there with open arms. I loved them for that. They offered true friendship despite my self-denial. I refused them, hip-hop and blackness once again.
After high school I went to Europe and took a long look at myself. How I had passed throughout high school is still a mystery to me. I found that hip-hop was all over the world. I met Africans in Paris who encouraged me to love myself and the hip-hop inside of me. My grandfather was Algerian, and I connected with African people for the first time in my life. The “real” me was a black me. If people didn’t like me because I was African American, then they weren’t my friends. I released all of the images projected on me about how to measure blackness. I accepted the fact that as a black woman, I had more to offer my community and the world by being myself, than I had if I pretended I was someone else.
In Paris, I came out. I was a black American woman and a hip-hop fan. I would support my brother in his music tastes and embrace the beauty of my family and community. I would never answer a question about my race or ethnicity with uncertainty. I was part of a legacy that was rich and beautiful. I would never hide from that again.
Nicole Hodges Persley
The Skin We’re In
“His skin looks like charcoal,” said my friend Nellie, when the new boy entered our fourth-grade classroom made up entirely of African American students. Charcoal, I thought, as I studied this newcomer with interest. He was taller than a lot of the other boys in the room. Tall and handsome. And he wasn’t skinny. See, ’cuz most of the fourth-grade boys were skinny. Their knees looked like their bones were trying to escape from bein’ suffocated by their skin, and their arms were frail and wobbly-like. But he wasn’t skinny. Uh-uh. His bones were growin’ strong, like he was a dedicated milk-drinker. And his skin, dark as the space behind my closed eyelids, was greeting our noisy classroom with a voice of its own. It spoke to us, and we all halted to attention, giving it our complete focus.
“Ha ha! Choco Bliss!” spunky little Wynton shouted to the room, and we erupted with laughter. I laughed too, not because it was very funny, but because I wanted Mr. “Choco Bliss” to catch me smiling.
“Michael, you may have a seat over there,” pointed Mrs. McMorley, focusing Michael, aka Choco Bliss, toward the boys’ side of the room. Michael looked at her and nodded confidently. He shoul’ was confident. Um hmm. And did I mention he was tall? And handsome?
My eyes were on Michael as he took an empty desk across the room. I wondered how comfortable he was, sitting over there next to all of the silly boys. I wanted to make sure they weren’t gonna be makin’ him feel uncomfortable or nuthin’. ’Cuz sometimes they made me feel real uncomfortable. Always makin’ jokes and laughing with each other. But you know, that’s just how silly boys are.
The whole class musta been thinkin’ what I was thinkin’, ’cuz they wouldn’t stop staring in Michael’s direction. In fact, we were so engaged in the richness of him that Mrs. McMorley had to raise her voice a couple of octaves higher just to get our attention back.
“You all are supposed to be focusing on your logic problems, not our newcomer,” she fussed.
Immediately the whole class shifted our eyeballs back to the class work laid out in front of us. I continued with my logic questions: If Jesse is Johnny’s cousin, and Johnny is the boy in the yellow sweater, and the boy in the yellow sweater is friends with Josie, then who is Josie’s friend?
There was no sense in me trying to make sense out of Josie, Johnny and Jesse. Michael made a lot more sense to me. I strayed from my work again and drove my eyes back over to his side of the room. I wondered how well he understood his logic questions. He had entered our class kind of late and Mrs. McMorley had already finished explaining the lesson. You would think she would’ve considered that before makin’ him do it. Maybe I could volunteer to help him. Then I would be able to sit by him. Then we could talk and become friends and maybe even trade friendship rings or something. Then maybe . . .
RING! The school bell interrupted my concerns for Michael, and we were given free time. The class got up and began to move around the room, searching for books, games, etc. The giggling goofy girls circled the reading section (surely to gossip rather than to read). I got up and moved closer to Michael. He was headed for the game section with all of the other boys, of course. I preferred to be slow and calculating so that no one would notice my preoccupation with befriending this dark stranger.
I moved leisurely toward the reading section, keeping my eyes on Michael the entire time. That’s when it happened.
Not paying attention to the shelf in front of me, I reached for the book at the same time as Natalie. She eyed me carefully and followed my gaze to Michael’s whereabouts. A fla
me of dawning comprehension immediately ignited in her eyes. She giggled and squealed audibly, “Oooooo. . . . Dominique likes Michael. Dominique likes the charcoal boy!”
“I do not,” I mumbled in annoyance, trying to maintain enough composure not to slap her face and push her into the bookshelf.
My calmed embarrassment must’ve been a sort of spinach to her, because suddenly her voice got stronger. Louder. “Dominique likes Charcoal!!!”
The other girls started laughing, singing along with her, “Ewwww . . . Dominique likes Michael!” or worse, “Dominique likes the black boy!!!” (Weren’t we all black?!)
Now, I was always one for attention . . . but certainly not when the joke was on me! The boys looked toward me and snickered. Suddenly they joined in, sneering and chortling, pointing at me like I was on display. Michael looked on too, snorting and jeering with the rest of them. I was so confused my head began to pierce with pain. Didn’t he know that they were laughing at him, too? My buttery skin was turning orange from flush, and I felt my eyebrows scowl in disgust. Suddenly, without thought, my defenses activated and went to work on my honor.
As loud as I could, I spattered, “I don’t like ugly charcoal boy!”
The pointing stopped. The class turned to Michael and immediately erupted with laughter.
Michael smiled shyly in spite of himself. He shifted uncomfortably back and forth on his heels and dropped his head in shame. There. I had done it. I had now taken the attention off of myself and put it on him. He was embarrassed. Almost as embarrassed as me.
Mrs. McMorley found our laughter and ridicule annoying, and banished us to our desks. Free time was over. And so was my hope of ever coming to know Michael as a friend. I looked over to him as he followed his feet back to his desk. For the remainder of the day, his head never lifted from its bow.