Yesterday I had a text conversation, at the most 10 lines, with a former teacher of a school I once attended. I was inquiring about the death of a former student. The conversation ended when after he suggested I might find a relative of hers on Instagram, I wrote: No, not really interested. She hadn't been very kind to me back then.
My mother's theory about why my classmates seemed all L'Enfant Terrible was that they were first born children and that I was the youngest of five, a configuration not otherwise seen in my class. I am not sure why that would have made them especially horrid but horrid they were.
One young girl punched me in the stomach each time, under the teacher's direction, I was allowed a drink from the water fountain with a reverse alphabet going first; rather than lining up from Z-A. Another kid, when invited to my home in the Dyckman Street Projects for a sleep over, threw a hissy-fit and demanded to go home when she saw that there was no doorman at my home to open the door for her. I remember distinctly telling her that I would open the door for her, in an attempt to calm her down and get her to stay, but that was not good enough. She sat screaming until taken home. One kid invited me over for a sleep over and spent the time clawing her nails into my skin calling me names until she fell to sleep. I could go on, even telling of the time of still another kid inviting me over for a sleep over and devising a game whereby we climbed to the top of a large box, jumping onto the bed below. She got me to the top of the box and refused to let me jump too. When I got thoroughly tired of having no fun whatsoever, I pushed her off the box to get my turn, her missing the bed and breaking her arm.
I say: tough luck buddy. These children were horrid, and no, not all children are horrid. I wasn't.
About ten years ago, sneaking in on the coattails of my brother's 40th high school reunion, I revisited that school which is now a low security prison in New York City. It was really a fun day, and I have to say now, that the only people who were kind to me at that school, other than a few teachers, were the older classmates of my two eldest brothers. They always had a smile or three minutes to pinch my cheek and laugh at my youth. I always remember them as the salve in the corridors of that school. One of the things that really struck me on that day was how many former students of colour, all older than me, fled the building on that day declaring: I don't remember those days as being filled with any Kumbaya. They remembered a racist time when seemingly they felt as I had back then.
So this ten line text got me to thinking about something else. I attended that school when we landed on the moon for the first time. When Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, when Harlem was set on fire in the wake of his death, when Bobby Kennedy lay bleeding in a kitchen, when integration was still an angry sentiment in the air that I breathed. And here I was in an experimental school with some of the best educators and psychologists involved with our curriculum. But it was, I think, a big fat experiment. Progressives, liberals, artists, and the bright learned side by side. How many sent their kids there for the desegregated education, and how many sent their kids for the education but despised desegregation? How many sent their kids there so they could be schooled side by side with other children of famous parents? I'll never know.
But the whole point of segregation is to keep whites and blacks separate; to keep the world from looking like me.
So I have to wonder if my existence was far more upsetting than merely being a Black student. I wonder if the horridness had anything to do with what children were told about me, my parents, and the filthy miscegenation that we were up to. I'll never know but that vitriolic vile bile seemed a bit excessive to me.
Last year I was in Costco, here in Mexico, and I saw a little girl with her mother whom looked Spanish to me. The little girl looked like me. I knew she was bi-racial, but I only had the mother to go on. Later at another store on the same day, I ran into this same mother and daughter only now the father was present. I stopped to talk to them this time as we all simultaneously recognized that we had something in common: the colour of our skin. I however was very aware that the little girl couldn't stop staring at me. I knew that look because I had adopted it when I was wee and I still adopt the look when I see another person who is bi-racial. I stare too. Parents of bi-racial children hate to hear this but bi-racial children don't look up at mom and dad and see themselves. They feel love and know they have parents, but they also know that there is something different about the way they look versus either parent. At 60 I see oodles of bi-racial people running around but I only have my brothers as true reflections of myself; what I look like.
Folks that are not bi-racial always take this as the segue into the very good reasons why children who are bi-racial should not exist. Go fuck yourselves.
They have this notion that those of us that are bi-racial wander around in some sort of operatic tragedy, that will end in consumption and a chorus of: I Told You So.
For the record I have never, not once, imagined myself a tragedy. I feel complete sympathy however for individuals that seem to be solely comfortable and prefer their own kind. I don't have that issue. I was lucky to be raised in such a way that imagining the world was all mine came to be so. Nothing about who I am has ever questioned my right to be, or imagined I was less than. I am racially bi-lingual, with a host of sub-cultures pulling up the rear. I am more integrated than anyone might dream a world to be.
But I know deeply what it feels like to recognize someone who looks like me. I have had parents of young bi-racial children ask me to be a mentor to their young children so that the given child has someone who looks like them in their lives. What an honour to be asked such a thing. But parents being parents, for the most part, only see themselves or their spouse in their children. The bi-racial child looks like neither parent, and while this can be said about all children, the bi-racial child has an additional level of separation from their parents. A good separation if nurtured by the parent(s).
So yes, I am always seemingly on the lookout for someone who looks like me because I often find home in their hearts. There is a shared upbringing with this stranger that even my parents are not privy to. I love this search. This journey. When I think of a humorous epithet for my epitaph I kind of like:
I Was Here Whether You Liked It or Not.
My mother's theory about why my classmates seemed all L'Enfant Terrible was that they were first born children and that I was the youngest of five, a configuration not otherwise seen in my class. I am not sure why that would have made them especially horrid but horrid they were.
One young girl punched me in the stomach each time, under the teacher's direction, I was allowed a drink from the water fountain with a reverse alphabet going first; rather than lining up from Z-A. Another kid, when invited to my home in the Dyckman Street Projects for a sleep over, threw a hissy-fit and demanded to go home when she saw that there was no doorman at my home to open the door for her. I remember distinctly telling her that I would open the door for her, in an attempt to calm her down and get her to stay, but that was not good enough. She sat screaming until taken home. One kid invited me over for a sleep over and spent the time clawing her nails into my skin calling me names until she fell to sleep. I could go on, even telling of the time of still another kid inviting me over for a sleep over and devising a game whereby we climbed to the top of a large box, jumping onto the bed below. She got me to the top of the box and refused to let me jump too. When I got thoroughly tired of having no fun whatsoever, I pushed her off the box to get my turn, her missing the bed and breaking her arm.
I say: tough luck buddy. These children were horrid, and no, not all children are horrid. I wasn't.
About ten years ago, sneaking in on the coattails of my brother's 40th high school reunion, I revisited that school which is now a low security prison in New York City. It was really a fun day, and I have to say now, that the only people who were kind to me at that school, other than a few teachers, were the older classmates of my two eldest brothers. They always had a smile or three minutes to pinch my cheek and laugh at my youth. I always remember them as the salve in the corridors of that school. One of the things that really struck me on that day was how many former students of colour, all older than me, fled the building on that day declaring: I don't remember those days as being filled with any Kumbaya. They remembered a racist time when seemingly they felt as I had back then.
So this ten line text got me to thinking about something else. I attended that school when we landed on the moon for the first time. When Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, when Harlem was set on fire in the wake of his death, when Bobby Kennedy lay bleeding in a kitchen, when integration was still an angry sentiment in the air that I breathed. And here I was in an experimental school with some of the best educators and psychologists involved with our curriculum. But it was, I think, a big fat experiment. Progressives, liberals, artists, and the bright learned side by side. How many sent their kids there for the desegregated education, and how many sent their kids for the education but despised desegregation? How many sent their kids there so they could be schooled side by side with other children of famous parents? I'll never know.
But the whole point of segregation is to keep whites and blacks separate; to keep the world from looking like me.
So I have to wonder if my existence was far more upsetting than merely being a Black student. I wonder if the horridness had anything to do with what children were told about me, my parents, and the filthy miscegenation that we were up to. I'll never know but that vitriolic vile bile seemed a bit excessive to me.
Last year I was in Costco, here in Mexico, and I saw a little girl with her mother whom looked Spanish to me. The little girl looked like me. I knew she was bi-racial, but I only had the mother to go on. Later at another store on the same day, I ran into this same mother and daughter only now the father was present. I stopped to talk to them this time as we all simultaneously recognized that we had something in common: the colour of our skin. I however was very aware that the little girl couldn't stop staring at me. I knew that look because I had adopted it when I was wee and I still adopt the look when I see another person who is bi-racial. I stare too. Parents of bi-racial children hate to hear this but bi-racial children don't look up at mom and dad and see themselves. They feel love and know they have parents, but they also know that there is something different about the way they look versus either parent. At 60 I see oodles of bi-racial people running around but I only have my brothers as true reflections of myself; what I look like.
Folks that are not bi-racial always take this as the segue into the very good reasons why children who are bi-racial should not exist. Go fuck yourselves.
They have this notion that those of us that are bi-racial wander around in some sort of operatic tragedy, that will end in consumption and a chorus of: I Told You So.
For the record I have never, not once, imagined myself a tragedy. I feel complete sympathy however for individuals that seem to be solely comfortable and prefer their own kind. I don't have that issue. I was lucky to be raised in such a way that imagining the world was all mine came to be so. Nothing about who I am has ever questioned my right to be, or imagined I was less than. I am racially bi-lingual, with a host of sub-cultures pulling up the rear. I am more integrated than anyone might dream a world to be.
But I know deeply what it feels like to recognize someone who looks like me. I have had parents of young bi-racial children ask me to be a mentor to their young children so that the given child has someone who looks like them in their lives. What an honour to be asked such a thing. But parents being parents, for the most part, only see themselves or their spouse in their children. The bi-racial child looks like neither parent, and while this can be said about all children, the bi-racial child has an additional level of separation from their parents. A good separation if nurtured by the parent(s).
So yes, I am always seemingly on the lookout for someone who looks like me because I often find home in their hearts. There is a shared upbringing with this stranger that even my parents are not privy to. I love this search. This journey. When I think of a humorous epithet for my epitaph I kind of like:
I Was Here Whether You Liked It or Not.
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