Mulatto Bildungsroman

I was wee when The Hudson still froze. We, my siblings and I, were bundled brown skin trudging across to The Bronx. Here, in Inwood, my family is not noticed; we are just a few amongst many. Anyone attempting difference is quickly reminded of the commonality of poverty; odds are we are wearing a neighbour's hand-me-downs.

I've known Anne forever; I have no sense that there might have been a time when we have not been confidantes. 

Green Gables was a dilapidated run down farm house in the middle of the woods when I was wee. Freda and I held hands and fancied ourselves kindred spirits as we traipsed through those woods wondering aloud if indeed we were walking the same steps as Anne and Diana once had. Freda made me kindred when she saw that I too had curly hair; she became kindred when I learned that she was a she in the midst of all boys; a configuration of family not unlike my own. Forty years later we still hold hands when we meet at airports or during a stroll out onto a pier.

I grew up in Spuyten Duyvil (1) and was raised partially on Prince Edward Island; from the spitting Devil to Anne's land: I am both. I am black, I am white, no more one than the other. I am Canadian, I am American. I am 'from away' (2) on both sides of this 49th parallel. I am not a tourist in either place but I am made a foreigner wherever I go. I am often asked for my papers of identity - sometimes I am strip searched before I am let go to carry on with what might have occupied me before the inquisition. Make no mistake: it is an inquisition in the truest sense of the word for the inquisitor's sole purpose is to gather information from me that will quench their odd thirst. The agenda seems always to be the same, and always I am discarded like the torn nylons of a whore at the end of a long night.

I recently read an essay titled, Twins and L.M. Montgomery. It was written by one elizabeth Waterston (3). I, like Genet, upon finishing Sartre's St. Genet (4), feel discovered and found out; laid bare by her words. Waterston writes, "… Millions who have grown up loving the story of the orphan Anne Shirley have found that it helped them move through some of the traumas of adolescence". This is a truth for me. Anne has always been with me and it is she that I have turned to while waiting for body and mind to synchronize. She was the one that sent words of courage and placed them lightly and sometimes ferociously upon my tongue. She gave me chutzpah and credence of self. Anne is with me when I have no words of my own; she sees me through the turbulences of my life.She is so real to me that perhaps it is me that is the imaginary one.

In my room, as a child, is a white sewing machine, the sort that one needs to reach into, like the womb of a woman giving life through caesarean. This night I am washed, soft, and ready for bed. I scramble to the top of the machine to inspect myself in the mirror which hangs above it. At this age my reflection is a playmate; a friend to wiggle and twist with; someone who looks like me; who seems happy to do what I do. Mirrors are marvellous. When I was wee I spent all available time in front of the mirror. I was looking for things not seen. I searched my eyes for my soul. I longed to see the other side of myself. I wore my mother's lingerie, and socked full her brassiere in attempt to see myself older. I was Fay Wray wrestling with Kong. I was a glamourous smoker, a belly dancer, and a stripper. I was a magnificent mulatto strutting with myself. There did come a moment when my reflection became confusing. But only for a brief moment. Nothing lingered. I so wish to know if this experience is had by all, or if indeed, this is what makes the mulatto a tragic figure in the imaginations of those not of mixed parentage. My reflection eventually became perplexing for it did not mirror my assumption of a three year old self: I thought I looked exactly like Marion, ma mère.

Ma mère had waist length blond hair. I had spent many hours in the shower on the reverse side of a curtain shielded from prying eyes with a bottle of White Rain moulding my hair into the various do's of the day- my mother's style being just one. I am Diana Ross with a starched flip, I have pigtails and when I am sure no one is looking I don the do of Barbie- the one I am forbidden to want or speak of, the doll that Marion is sure will lead me down the road to touching myself or thrusting my soon to be budding breasts into the faces of strange men. I long for Barbie's life. I can't wait to thrust and touch. I do not look like Marion in an obvious way and it is this truth that aligns me with Anne for it is then that I begin to fancy myself surely an orphan.

Through Anne I learned to love myself. Anne was at my side as I came to terms with my curly hair not being foot length and blond like ma mère's; the woman now known as Marion. There are all sorts of orphans I suppose; I don't know what sort I am for both my parents are alive. When I was wee Marion was known as Jeanne; she changed her name when I was sturdy and grown. In department stores Jeanne often lost sight of me, and like many children I was taken in by clerks who soothed my brow and fed me treats while ma mères' name was broadcast over a PA system. What if she had changed her name while rummaging for fabrics?

In Pokemouche(5) Freda hears what I hear: she hears Jeanne's own cousin say that Marion once, when approached by this cousin, denied to the cousin that it was she. Some of us want to be orphans; others yearn for eternal anonymity.

I could have been lost to her forever;  I should have been taken home by the clerks whom were so much better at soothing my brow and feeding me treats.

O, all it is, is just another reason to hold one's head high; never matter, o never mind.

It is not easy to be bi-racial for I must live this life of mine in the company of others. Left alone I'm fine- but my configuration of race seems to exhaust everyone else. I never think about who I am until it is presented back to me through the eyes of others. Once I am handed back to myself, I too am exhausted. I have often been asked if I feel like the light skinned Negro character, Sara Jane Johnson, depicted in Douglas Sirk's film, An Imitation of  Life(6). So often have I been asked about this film that curiosity eventually got the best of me and out I went to rent it. I'm not sure what I expected but I was rather appalled that anyone who claimed to have known me would ever get the idea that I was anything like that film. I had expected to view a film that perhaps depicted some of the feelings or experiences that I have had. (Too, what I had not considered when viewing the film was that the film is written from the perspective of White America in fear of miscegenation. The Tragic Mulatto is the imaginary manifestation of a segregated White society up in arms and dreadfully fearful of a Black population becoming so light skinned that one can not visually keep the races separate). That film is all about White angst and nothing to do with me. The only reason Sara Jane's character is fraught with turmoil is not because she is light skinned but because she lives in a racist society that won't let her rest anywhere). At the time it was upsetting to think that others thought of me as a confused, lost, miserable woman who felt ostracized by life and burdened by my skin colour. To think that others thought I had no niche, and therefore floundered, was disconcerting. -- (The 2008 film, Skin, did capture many of my experiences. Though the details of Sandra Laing's life differ vastly from my own, her encounters with a racist (Apartheid) White society do not.  The film is quite precise in its depictions of respect being something that is not given to people of colour. Skin colour becomes fetishized, eroticized and preyed upon by Whiteness and that often Whiteness is unaware that it preys upon people of colour. Watching these two films side by side one can easily pick apart and see clearly that Blackness by itself does nothing but that it often triggers in others an irrational configuration of anxieties which have no private outlet and is too often taken out on innocent people just trying to go about their lives).

I have encountered skepticism throughout my life from individuals who can not fathom some of my varied and sometimes bizarre encounters but it has given me great solace to learn that others who identify themselves as bi-racial have had similar encounters.

In Lise Funderburg's remarkable book, Black, White, Other(7), she asks all of her participants to name any and all people they could think of who might be bi-racial: anecdotally everyone mentioned, Imitation of Life. I interpret this to mean that I am not alone in having had this film thrust upon me for it was always in the context of the 'tragic mulatto'. I have yet to meet any person of mixed heritage who views themselves as tragic. It is only those who do not live in our skins that can not understand the concept and therefore deem it as some sort of tragedy. (Pay attention as you read papers, articles, books, headlines, what-have-you, how often those that have mixed ancestry are linked to words like outcast, tragic, half-caste, etc. Then ask yourself: is it those with mixed ancestry defining themselves this way or the writer placing their own feelings onto their subject?)

I must talk about this film for a moment for I think many misinterpret it and what it is truly about. The only aspect I wish to address in, An Imitation of Life, is its depiction of a character who desperately appears to pass for white. Sara Jane's mother (Juanita Moore) is darker than her daughter (Susan Kohner, a genuine, real McCoy white woman) but we are never told who or where the father is. He is so blatantly left out of any dialogue that one has to assume that Sara Jane was conceived through rape and that the rape was done by a white man. The entire film, in a nutshell, is about White anxieties of miscegenation, the dilemma of white men creating miscegenation in the first place, Jim Crow laws that ensured all children conceived through rape (American slavery through 1972), were legally forced to stay with the birth mother so that the lineage of Black would make passing difficult.  The film begins when Sara Jane is about nine, or so, and she and her mother move in with a white woman (Lana Turner). The woman's daughter (Sandra Dee) is about the same age as Sara Jane. Sara Jane's mother is soft-spoken, well-spoken and extremely kind, yet nothing she does is tolerated by Sara Jane. Sara Jane's sole goal in this film is to get as far away from her mothers skin colour, and to be known, and accepted as a White woman. They are living all together not as roommates but as a White woman wanting to get ahead in life and asking a black woman to live with her and act as her maid. She gets ahead on the back of blackness. All Juanita Moore's character gets out of the relationship is a roof over her head in exchange for her dignity. Their Blackness is asked to disappear when company and suitors come. Sara Jane and Sandra Dee's character are not sharing anything; neither toys, social invitations, the dinner table, or a bedroom. The film asks one to accept much, the biggest assumption being that those of us who can pass are doing so because we wish to be white; a theory which I disagree with. I posit that white theories that imagine blacks wishing to be white are theories based upon the belief that power and Whiteness will always be inextricable. I believe that passing for another race is more a desire to obtain the same privilege and opportunity of the dominant race than having anything to do with wanting to change one's race. I am not dismissing internalized racism but rather excluding it: for the moment I do not think it relevant. In any case, Imitation of Life, is not a film about me, nor can I read into it any feature of being bi-racial from the perspective of the bi-racial.  It's a film about the anguish, and anxiety that White Americans have struggled with since the Emancipation Proclamation.  Yet over and over, I am asked if this film depicts my experiences. I struggle to understand what it is about this film that makes some make this leap for me. The leap that skin colour is somehow connected to being bi-racial. I always come back to one conclusion: Jim Crow. I also have to remind myself and you, that that film was neither written by, directed or told from the perspective of a person of colour. The film is about what concerns White people and what they want to express. It's what they envision and think about. Both Sirk and Fannie Hurst, the author of Imitation of Life, were both people very involved in their private lives with issues of race. Sirk a German, being married to a Jew during the war years and Hurst, Jewish, who because of her relationship with Zora Neale Hurston, was inspired to write Imitation. We write, make films and create visual art that reflects the times we live in. None of The Brown people in that film tell you anything about what they think. All you see is them reacting to the world around them. In short: history is written by the winners. Under Jim crow and segregation The Brown are not allowed opinions.

To be able to 'pass' is to suggest that Jim Crow fails in its attempt to segregate, it further suggests the the White society that created the institution is losing the ground of power. The bi-racial is visual representation of that ground being lost. The irony in all of this is that the power had by those that created the Jim Crow system is the same 'power' that created the passer and the bi-racial. Black women under slavery did not have control over when or with whom they might reproduce offspring. This irony, I wonder if, is internalized racism for whites, for how does one emotionally part with one's own children, sending them to such a plight as slavery? It takes a certain pathology to divorce oneself from the very mayhem and alienation you yourself have created creating more and more rules to live by as the mayhem spreads. I do not believe internalized racism is solely a dilemma for African Americans'. Further, I believe that the 'what are you?' questions that are leveled at me are a direct hold over from Jim Crow: Blacks having to carry papers which Whites had the legal right to ask for and scrutinize at any time.

Jim Crow(8) was constructed by a White society that felt a need to ensure that blacks could never become White no matter how white one might appear. This became the 'one drop rule', a rule that is fostered, and in effect to this day. If one can pass, it is assumed that one is light-skinned enough to do so. It is further assumed that one is lighter than the parent that is the darker complected one. Passing for the one that chooses to do so, as I've said before, is done to attain the privileges and opportunities of the race that has the privilege. So what might this all mean to a White society that constructed Jim Crow? In a simplistic explanation we might assume that Jim Crow keeps one side with the goodies and the other without the goodies, one up, one down. But what if you can not longer tell by looking what side one is on?

--(If you read this and think this is not an uniquely American obsession read any daily headlines of 2016, and notice the free for all of violence towards people of colour, the xenophobia and the right people feel they have to see your genitals if they are unsure of your gender. This is unprecedented in recent history but a very old story of life in America. All we are doing is repeating our unique past. Go to Without Sanctuary and focus on three things: That these are postcards sent to friends with, 'wish you were here' sentiments, notice the expressions of the all white audience in attendance to these lynchings and the gaze of the camera; what has the camera fetishized? What is the camera wanting to show you, the vicarious participant? Back bodies. Bloated, bleeding, wrists in shackles- which is an ongoing theme to this day: watch your nightly news and watch African American people under arrest, there is a preponderance of camera shots focused on wrists shackled whereas arrested whites are seen hooded or with a paper of some kind obscuring the face. Innocent until proven guilty versus must be guilty).

The disenfranchised in America, the poor, the immigrant, LGBT community and forever the African American, can be viewed as one group now. We arrived in America with our genitals exposed and prodded. It is the privilege of White men to rape when they want; it is the goal of White men to keep rape (rape of women, all children but white children, land, minerals, countries, horizons) for themselves. All others, the collective disenfranchised, are jailed for thinking they are equal in this privilege. And it is this pathology of Whiteness that sees this imbalance not as an imbalance but rather an indication that something is wrong with the other, never the self. At all costs, never the self.

What if you can no longer tell by looking what side one is on? I think this is the number one irrational fearful obsession of White America; it's what eats away at the American psyche. If you can't tell by looking how do you exclude? Once the line is made vague and indistinguishable, power becomes vague and indistinguishable and new methods must be implemented to exclude.

(If you imprison Black males during their prime and during their prime reproductive lives, you've found a new way to exclude. If you tear men away from their families (sold down the river) and send them to jail for exorbitant amounts of time for non violent crimes, you've found a solution to not only exclude but to dismember the cohesion of black families. If you dismember the family and removed the father figure you leave countless children to fend for themselves and to be viewed as bastards and not worth your time or effort).

In Possessing the Secret of Joy, Alice Walker gives the following dialogue to the character Adam: "…I remember when we first arrived in America. His excitement to be, finally, "safe" and back home. And his shock at being constantly harassed because he was black. No, no he used to correct me. They behave this way not because I'm black but because they are White"(9). I am always reminded of this passage when I am stopped, and asked to explain something of about myself.  I have to always remind myself that I am not being asked odd question or rude questions because I am Black but rather because the inquisitor is White and has created a legacy that only their own work can iron out the psyche; I can not rid another of their internalized racism. It is Althea Prince, whom in her essay, Stop Calling Us "Slaves"(10) nudges me, and reminds me that I am not a descendent of slaves. I am a descendent of Africans. And I am a descendent of rape.

I encountered a whole range of emotions while reading Lawrence Hill's, Black Berry, Sweet Juice: On Being Black and White in Canada. I dived into the book with high expectations and finished with the belief that I had stumbled upon a living 'tragic mulatto'. I admire anyone for laying bare their guts, through words, for the entire world to see, but I felt sorry for Mr. Hill. I wanted to befriend him and hold him near for he seems so lost. It needs to be said too that I have held the belief and perhaps the fantasy that life in Canada is a finer life for those of us that run the hue spectrum of tawny. Lawrence Hill demolished that thought. But I ask myself, why? What made his book so very different from Lise Funderburg's? Both books incorporate the format of interview alongside autobiography of author. both keep the subject/s limited to individuals with one parent being black and the other white. So how did so profoundly different books emerge? How did mulattoes below the 49th parallel emerge with so much gusto and those north of the border seem so isolated; going through life without a road map seemingly?

I think some of the clues are that Funderburg interviewed sixty-five subjects and Hill thirty-four. To a certain extent this tells me that there may be fewer bi-racials to be found in Canada (population on a whole, and language differences across Canada may account for this perception too). What struck me most however about Hill's book though was how insecure and out of place he felt in his own skin. Mr. Hill recounts a story about changing his barber, who he had gone to for years, because the barber was not black and Mr. Hill therefore felt he was being disloyal to his blackness. I cant relate to this on any level. Almost all of those interviewed seemed angry, preoccupied with the colour of their skin as well as the texture of their hair. Mr. Hill made me feel thankful that here in America we have many more years of practise at being bi-racial and had moved beyond those types of concerns. This is not to say that hair is not a subject south of the border but rather that it is a subject that has gone from wishing and doing anything possible to have different results with our hair to embracing it in all its glory.

My perspective is not better, merely different. I have never felt certain that I knew what a person felt like who was not bi-racial. It is because of the questions that I am often compelled to answer, that I make the leap and assume, that not being bi-racial is perhaps something to be considered differently; I had thought we were all the same, though I have never felt compelled to intrude int the lives of others in ways that I have often been expected to tolerate.

I am sitting on Sutter Street, on my stoop, in the Fillmore district a million miles from Rustico. I am lonely. Lonely and flyaway, like a Tibetan prayer flag: all too susceptible to things blown in on a whim. Prone to being carried places I do not wish to go. I am quiet inside. I pray that my confessions are carried on winds to ears that listen. I miss Freda. Everything is sexualized here: my clothes, my hair, the colour of my skin, the way in which I speak. Everything draws me to the attentions of others. I am amused at times but mostly I feel an urge to cover myself. One dresses for others here; never for utilitarian means. Had I ever worn something down to here or up to there Id have been taken to task by a whole community. Here I am taken to task for looking so retarded- dressing, as I'm told, like sloppy white people. I am at that age where they might succeed with my emotional demise, for they seem always to thrust a dent or two into my psyche.

I spend time in front of the mirror again only now I practise to be anything other that what I am. All that I am is wrong and needs to be re-translated. I must work on my speech, my accent. My reflection is only as deep as what others might be allowed to see. I must find a cigarette to smoke that does not draw attention and that I can inhale without feeling sick from the flavour. I draw the line at menthol - no way am I going to smoke menthol's - inhaling the Swiss Alps - I might as well quit. Anne suggests that I do things with flair; she says: don't let the troops get you down. Someone I admire, smokes Sherman's so I take up this brand later learning that Garbo puffed away on Sherman's too. I am in good company. How do I describe what it is like to pull out a box of Sherman's as a teenager, in a bathroom fill with Kool smokers? I might as well have pulled out my breast for a lick. No understanding or curiosity here. No, "Can I get one off of ya?" I am glanced at askew as though my breast has now taken to travel on its own complete with the suite of luggage it needs. I have left the real black girls speechless, and they, in unison, and in single file leave me to the empty stalls of a high school bathroom; alone with the drip of an ancient sinks. They have defined me: I am a high-yellow-half-bred-white-cigarette-smoking-bitch that thinks she is better than everyone else.  I still do not understand this compulsion to define others by my way of thinking. I don't know what this fear of difference means to some. Anne reminds me of Garbo. She reminds me of the long run when I will become metamorphic and change into what everyone else wishes to be. Thus I am welcomed back to America.

In America when I am young and slim; tanned and exotic everyone wants to be close. Black men desire me because I am high yellow. White men because I am not too dark; they say I am exotic. What they don't say is that I am still dark enough for them to leave my feelings and concerns out of the equation. I am reduced to a thing to place another thing into; a receptacle. I am no longer a person that has any meaning beyond her genitals. This pisses me off. When I exert my wanderlust and my tree climbing abilities I am abruptly taken to task. I am asked, "Why do you act so white?"

What would Anne do? She would light up her gumption and let the scope of imagination fill the air. Yes, this too shall pass.

There is something about my appearance that upsets people. I am not sure if upset is the right word to be using here. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say something about me unnerves. Too, something about me makes people feel free to degrade.

The other day, while looking for an apartment to rent, I was once again asked to divulge my racial identity. (White people do not get asked what race they are and if you do ask (with the same straight face you get asked with), to be funny, or as a joke, be quick about cupping your hands and be prepared to catch a set of eyeballs as they pop out of the head before you). If truth be told, I find this question boring, extremely impolite, never asked for any good reason and a good indication that the requesting party is a bigot. and agreement

This is what happened: After laying it out and being asked to repeat it because he needed to get it straight, he informed me that I was a mongrel and that he was not a racist.

This is what I thought: If I tell him he is a racist or if I had told him that my ethnicity was none of his damned business he would have prevented me from seeing the apartment. He would also, more than likely, have considered me a hostile person. I judged him to be in his seventies and that suggested to me that he most likely grew up seeing signs of segregation and that he probably imagined himself liberated and progressive. My upbringing instilled in me a respect for my elders so I said nothing to this man. At the end of the viewing he told me that I he liked me, (he misinterpreted my silence to mean I was in agreement with him concerning my mongrel status and that he could come round when he wanted to and that together we might push that envelope back and forth), and that he would rent the apartment to me.

What's a good Negro? What's a black person that whites find acceptable and welcome with open arms? It's one that doesn't draw your attention to the fact that they have been insulted. It is one that doesn't call you out on just how insulting you really are. It's the Black that doesn't get bent out of shape and takes it all in good fun when you claim you are just kidding. It is the Back that goes silent when you admonish him or her with: Don't be so sensitive! even though those eyeballs would be under the davenport should the tables be turned.

This line of questioning is par for the course with those of us of mixed heritage. Lawrence Hill devotes an entire chapter to this line of questioning. The chapter is called, The Question(11). In the often humorous book, Talking About Difference: Encounters in Culture Language and Identity,(12) writers from Canada of mixed heritage write about this theme too. Lawrence Hill has an essay in this book titled: Zebra: Growing Up Black and White in Canada. In the former essay, The Question, Hill is more likable to me. He mentions that when he is asked The Question he refuses to answer not because he is ashamed to answer but rather because it is always demanded of him to answer (13). It seems our not-so-easy-to-define makeup and appearance drives some people to distraction. having read so many stories on the subject, some riotously funny, I have learned two things. One, I am not paranoid: it really is happening, and two, I have some snappy comebacks for the next time I am asked, The Question.

I have never asked anyone what race or ethnicity they were. I can not think of one single thing to do with such information and can not figure out how one might use it to further a relationship or gain a friend. Thus I render the question rude as well as useless. I also never ask what someone does for a living. Race and occupation are inquiries that support the construction of status and the need to learn of this status in others is a shorthanded way to quickly assess how much or how little to value another. The how and when you are asked these questions is a direct indication of who is asking you and what their intent it. Under 20 minutes- don't waste your time answering. After a few months of hanging out? - you may just have a friend. I am normally never asked The Question during the normal progression of conversation. It usually is blurted out after I have said something that doesn't coincide with a listeners idea of what I am supposed to be. (It is normally never asked with others present or those present are usually socially known to one another whereas I am not). It's almost as if one has heard something that they can not bear to live with for another moment and instead have to interrupt me to ask life saving clarity questions. You would be surprised how often, once the question has been answered the asking person walks away. They are not interested in me but rather in keeping their assumptions intact. It takes courage to hear something different from what we already believe. When we want to meet someone new and get to know them we listen to what they say, listen for something interesting or a common ground and then we elaborate forever outwards until a bond forms. If the first question you ask of someone is: What are you, where are you from or I think you are mixed, am I right? You are not trying to make me feel welcome and invite me in. You are isolating me and clearly letting me know I am not welcome in said group. If I get asked those questions and you are privy to the verbal rape and exclusion and say nothing you have let me know that you allowed someone else to decide for you what is valuable to you. You have let me down too.

There is a story that I tell about coming back to America and living in the Fillmore district in San Francisco. The story is about 'getting rid' of a Macy's shopping bag filled with marijuana lids for a guy who had asked me if I thought I could get rid of them. I had no experience with slang or drug vernacular and I took his words literally. I do not smoke pot, then or now, but I was always, at that time, asked if I had any pot. When this young man asked me this question I saw it as an opportunity to make friends and to finally have the item I was always asked for. Unlike cigarettes, I observed that pot smokers passed joints around. It was a shared thing and users tended to be friendly by my estimation. I also had always heard it referred to as something grown. So there was nothing in my experience with pot to make me understand or believe that it was something that was purchased. It was grown, like potatoes or rhubarb, and therefore I assumed that like too many tomatoes on the vine, it was given away instead of seen going to waste.
I love myself for this experience.

I gave the pot away and never collected a dime. when people offered me money I declined in the same way I would decline taking payment for goodies my garden might yield. I think this is a funny story but every time I tell it to strangers I am always asked the same thing:

Where are you from?
This question might be normal if it weren't for the next question which is always:
What are you?

It should simply be a funny story but it seems to gall quite a few people. One person went so far as to grill me about the details of my family members and friends - his questions- he was a student and a policeman, were aimed at uncovering the drug addicted or incarcerated people he was sure I was related to. When he found none, he simply shook his head in disbelief. He never spoke to me when passing but rather shook his head each time he saw me. for him, it was irrational to his sensibilities to encounter a person of colour who did not have a keen understanding of drug use. He was sure I was lying. I had told him a story that failed to confirm and conform to his idea of who I was based solely upon race. These two questions which are persistently asked of me, with the telling of this story, suggest a few things to me. First, to be asked where I am from is to imply that my story is foreign in nature. It makes the assumption that my story has never happened to anyone who looks like me or talks like me in New York City, San Francisco, and Hartsdale, NY; all places that I have told this story. Or I might assume that all of the people I have told are pot smokers and have never met a non pot smoker and are astonished that such a person exists. Perhaps it is true that I am indeed the only non pot smoker in these cities.  Maybe my story is not funny at all and in reality all my listeners are non smokers and are horrified that in their midst is a drug dealer. I have told this story in Crompond, New York too, to riotous effect even, but the listeners were smoking pot and because I have often heard that smokers get something called 'the giggles' as a side effect to smoking marijuana I can not trust the authenticity of their laughter.

When 'where are you from?" is followed by What are you?", I realize that there is something about my story that jars the listeners' perceptions of who I am and where they think I am from. There is something about my telling of the story that causes the listener to ask two questions that do not seem like questions of natural progression. I might ask how the story teller got out of the situation or I might ask if the teller was forced to retrace their steps and collect the money for the marijuana. I also might ask if the story teller ever saw the man again.  These two questions asked together with the telling of that story suggest to me that when people hear my story they assume it is not the story or experience of a person that looks like me. I have gained a considerable amount of weight with each telling of that story but no one has ever asked me what weight I was when this event transpired. You may see this example on the page and you might say to yourself this is a dumb question - you may ask yourself: what does her weight have to do with the story but I ask, what does my racial makeup or where I am from have to do with the story? Those two questions, I believe, are really asking and saying something quite different. Those to questions tell me that something about my story and me has upset and caused a confusion of some sort within the order of things of the listener. The questions are asked to reformulate and make certain what as assumed about me just by looking. And the only thing we can tell about another person just by looking is on the surface: obvious physical handicap, deformity, size and skin colour. We can not tell race from looking but we are in the habit of assessing it nonetheless.

When I wear the Star of David every Hasidim within sight assumes I am Sephardi, I am often assumed to be a Moor. I am Spanish when conversations are begun in Spanish and ended when I am discovered as having inadvertently passed. When I lived in Little Italy up in The Bronx I was often asked if I was Sicilian. People from all over the world and in all countries are looking and listening for people they can claim as their own. The more remote and isolated we become from what we perceived to be people like us the lower our reasons for connections get. When the pickings are plentiful I may want a social group that shares an educational level or common hobbies. I may only want to associate with people who share my religion or race and I can live a whole life having things just the way we wish. When we remove the variety of choice to choose from we are forced, because we are social animals, to discover that those outside our comfort zones have the exact same things to offer. Remove it even further, say a deserted island inhabited by two known enemies and in time you will find two people working together and learning to actually love one another because they must depend upon one another in a way that  those with choice will never have to.

I do not mind being asked if I am these various identities. I enjoy it in fact because it makes me feel that I am truly connected to mankind as I should be. But when I answer "no" to all of the above and I am immediately asked to reveal what I am by a complete stranger I realize that the person with questions now needs to reassess what was assumed so as not to make the same mistake twice. They feel I tricked.

I tell Freda the marijuana story and ask her when she first understood what pot was. She says she was in her late teens. She says no one had that stuff on the Island when we were kindred.

Much more recently I am at a holiday party with D. She is the daughter of a well known person who I am in the employ of. We are sitting together on a day-bed in the late evening chatting. I like her, and I assume that so far she like me too. In all ways she is polite and well intentioned. Suddenly a hand extends to her, interrupting our conversation. My hand is shaken only when D kindly turns towards me and introduces me to the body attached to the handshake. A firm one I might add. So firm that it feels aggressive. I hold myself back from rubbing it in feigned soreness. The hand shaker acknowledges me and immediately returns wholeheartedly to D I am left to listen or disappear. I am sure that I can sense that D is slightly amused and embarrassed by the hand shaker's aggression, She, the hand shaker, is clutching a glass of wine with a mitt that is as huge as my grandmother Germaine's. I wonder if she is from New Brunswick. I am struck by this woman's focus. She is on a mission and its sole goal is to make herself known to D. I am no one to her. But I am weary of going away when not wanted. I wait until something is said that will afford me the opportunity to join in.

The woman, who surely comes from somewhere near new Brunswick, finally reveals that her job has recently exposed her to an upsurge of clients that are into drugs and far more desperate than she has seen in all her years as a social worker. She also reveals that she is from Maine which gives me fleeting smugness - a stones throw from New Brunswick - we're probably related with mitts like that but right now she is as busy as a fart in a mitt trying to seduce D. It is then that she includes me into the conversation with eye contact. I interpret this sudden inclusion at this point to mean that she believes me to have great insight on the subjects of desperation and drugs. I can't hide my face; I imagine it pinched and about to fold in on itself. She reveals quite sincerely that in all her years she had not know such problems exist to this extent. she wonders aloud if she is naïve. I tell her that I believe most of the world is desperate and immediately I think of the term 'economic segregation (we are standing in Vermont). I make a mental note to think more about that term at a later time. D. nods her head in agreement with me which prompts the interloper to begin wondering who I am. She wants immediately to know what I do for a living. I smile like Pirate Jenny and tell her that I work for D's mother. This is what is said:

Her: I didn't know that.
Me: I can't imagine why you would. We have only just met.
Her: But this is a small town. That's the sort of thing I would know about.
Me: I can't imagine why. I don't know anything about you.
Her: How did you get to Vermont?
I glance at D and she kindly steps in to answer this awkward questioning
D: New York, Canada, Massachusetts, Vermont.
Her: What part of Canada?
Me: Prince Edward Island
Her husband arrives; he is introduced all around; he has caught the part about Prince Edward Island.
Her Husband: Why did you come to Vermont? What are you doing here?
D's husband arrives.
D's Husband: You don't have to answer that question
Me: Are you two the Vermont police? I don't know what to say…

She and husband look confused. The room empties as though D, her husband and I single-handedly  pooped on the party. I have to remind myself constantly that anyone who approaches me with a 'What are you doing here?" question is trying to ruin my enjoyment at the same damned party.
'What are you doing here?" is not the sort of question one asks to be friendly or inclusive. The tone of that question can not even be changed to camouflage its aggression. I walk a precarious line and my reader must always remember that if I fail to say anything it is me that must relax my throat , take that huge dismissal in and swallow what is handed me. I resent the excuses given me of socially inept, or unconscious, or just clueless. I resent them because they take no responsibility for the hurt they cause. And I am lashed back upon a second time if I draw attention to my hurt, the faux-pas, or for taking a moment to enlighten. People of colour are clairvoyant in some respects. We know when we have been lingered over a moment longer than all the rest. It is a moment so brief that it is indiscernible to all but The brown Ones. In that flash we understand that we have been placed outside until we prove imaginary intangible things to people who imagine themselves important to us. The only other people I am aware of that are fined tuned like this and can smell shit before the fart, are Jewish people. Now that I live in an area where Jewish people are few and coming from New York, my ears are attuned to anti-Semitism. When people think they are not near Jewish people they feel free to be anti-Semitic. When they see one brown person in a sea of white faces they don't even bother to pretend they have one black friend. Decorum is no longer necessary.

In the years since I have read Native Son(14), I have had the opportunity, to rethink Richard Wright and to, at times, high five his literary creation of Bigger Thomas in all his raging glory. I understand both Wright and Bigger more than I want to. Sadly, I think Bigger was not so hard for wright to conjure up. Ive heard that Wright was a sad, angry man. Anecdotally, my friend Gray, while in Paris, describes Wright as, "An angry black man looking for a fight with any poor white schmo that stumbled past his table". Wright wanted some guts for garters and Gray was one of those white schmoes who were eaten alive.

Ces't domage. Ces't la vie.

In the literary canon I can find the silence of black male characters that often translates to the silence that living black men feel in this society. But I as a woman feel it too. Bigger Thomas is White society's nightmare. The huge murderous black man out to rape white women. But I can't help but feel that the interrogation that is presented to me without any sort of foreplay or introduction is not dissimilar from enslaved women not having control over their reproductive choices. I shall answer the questions posed to me because I am feminine, I am weak. Both feel intrusive, like a rape: the female made controllable, made submissive, the male controllable only through emasculation and silence. It is maddening to be violated. It causes me to feel full of rage and indignation and it is at these times that I wish I had the literary freedom of Bigger - the freedom to just be an imaginary character upon a page, with no real consequences to be had, for I too, for just a moment, might chose murder if only for just a page or two.

Being black is not a monolith. I speak for myself but I speak hoping to teach; each of us must make ourselves seaworthy making patches and bailing water as we go, but always we must be our own navigators.


GLOSSARY

White: is referring to the social construction of power in a dominant culture or society. It is a mindset with specific expectations.

white: is simply a colour as we understand it.

FOOTNOTES

1. Spuyten Duyvil is the Old Dutch name meaning Spitting Devil. It is in reference to where The Hudson meets the Harlem River, in northern most of Manhattan (between Inwood and Marble Hill, The Bronx); there the waters are tumultuous whirlpools and spin violently.

2. To be from anywhere other than Prince Edward Island or The Canadian Maritime.

3. Waterston, Elizabeth 1988. Orphans, Twins and L.M. Montgomery. In Family Fictions in Canadian Literature, ed. Peter Hinchcliffe, 68-76. Waterloo: University of Waterloo Press.

4. St. Genet written by Jean-Paul Sartre was a tour de force critique and psychoanalysis of Jean Genet's written work. Upon reading it, Genet found he was unable to write for some time because he felt exposed, and vulnerable, and had not realized how transparent he had been or might have been to the reader while writing.

5. Pokemouche, New Brunswick: where this writers maternal grandmother once lived and died.

6. The 1959 film rendition starring Juanita Moore, Lana Turner, Sandra Dee and Susan Kohner.

7. Funderburg, Lise. Black, White, Other. William Morrow, New York, 1994. Page 12.

8. See: Who Is Black? One nation's Definition by F. James Davis for a full historical overview of Jim Crow in America.

9. Walker, Alice. Possessing the Secret of Joy. Harcourt Brace, New York, 1992. Page 38.

10. Prince, Althea. Being Black: Essays by Althea Prince. Insomniac, Toronto, 2001. Page 39

11. Ibid. Page 173.

12. James, Carl E and Shadd, Adrienne. Talking About Difference: Encounters in Culture Language and Identity. Between the Lines, Toronto, 1994.

13. Ibid. page 46.

14. Wright, Richard. Native Son. The main protagonist, an African American called Bigger Thomas is a murderer. It is Wright's premise that White society creates Bigger through racism.