Writing, day 6

an excerpt:

Just black, then


An overheard conversation of three of my students:
A: Where are you from?
B: My family is from Ghana
A: Nigga, you ain’t from Africa – look how white you are! Really, where are you from?
B. Ghana. (he looks to the third boy) Where are you from?
C. America
B. No, dummy, where are your people, your parents from?
C. Down South. I’m not sure exactly where.
B. Oh, so you’re just black, then?

I am afraid that since I have moved (or escaped from) the South, that most of my stories begin or end or travel through there. Even when I don’t want them to. Even when I try to forget it, the City puts a mirror to my face. There it is.

I wanted to start this essay with this conversation I overheard while chaperoning middle schoolers Upstate to pick apples. This was to avoid starting with an obvious statement like I’m from the South or to start again the endless cycle of comparison between the City and what I am calling home.

Back home, we are not so much occupied (that is, anymore. It is the New South) with this idea of ethnic identity. Blame it one its history. I do. Rather, we simplify into broad categories capable of containing many exceptions. We identify as either: white, black or mixed (added post-Jim Crow to accommodate an idea of the “other”). You can tell a non-southerner by their need to create sub-categories to this filing system. They’ll say: “I’m white, but my mother’s family is from Ireland )or England – whichever European country will allow such classification),” or they’ll say, “I’m mixed: my father is Indian and Black; my mother is German.”

If I was in the conversation with those boy’s I’d be just black, then. I learned this label several ways: first, upon playing on my daycare playground and being told that I couldn’t play games with them because their parents said they weren’t allowed to play with “Blacks.” Another time I learned was when we were vacationing in Washington, DC and my father was looking for a parking space, and we had entered into this battle with someone who claimed to have seen it first, and my mother leaned out the window, and the woman leaned and said we should take our black asses back where we came from, and my mother – self-identifying for the woman – said we were taking our black asses and parking there. So the woman did not get the park. We were just black asses and the woman had said it and my mother confirmed. There were no other questions.