Inside out

When I was three my younger brother and I were in a house fire and suffered extensive burns. So I have scarring, lots of scarring. Over the years the patterns have changed and as I have grown some have gotten smaller, unnoticeable. At least to others. I am aware of each and every one. Well, as a young girl wondering how I would be accepted in a world that prizes beauty and shuns imperfection I had an amazing father. He told me that I could be anything I wanted to be when I grew up, if I wanted it enough. My favorite television show was “Julia” with Diahann Carroll and I wanted to be her. I wanted to have Diahann’s beautiful flawless skin. I wanted to have her self confidence and her pride. I wanted to be black. Rather hard to do when your ethnic background is Scot-Irish-Swedish-American Indian. But that is what I wanted more than anything. Well, I didn’t grow up to be black but the wish was there in the back of my mind and so when I looked at the world around me it became a part of my world lens. And it made me want to learn more about Diahann and about blacks in America. I had made the decision at an early age that to be black had to be a fabulous thing and I was full of envy for those that were black.

My favorite book as a young person and still one of my favorites is the “Autobiography of Malcolm X.” I read it and re-read it. On television I watched and learned of Martin Luther King Jr., Angela Davis, Stokely Carmichael, and so many more. In school I did papers on Malcolm X, the Harlem Renaissance, and Tuskegee Airmen. I made the decision early that if I wanted to know more about being black in America I would have to find out on my own because in the 1960s and the 1970s school history classes weren’t going to volunteer the information. In fact, when I became a mother in the late 1970s and sent my children to school in the 1980s school history books still didn’t shed much if any light on what it means to be black in America.

I became a grandmother in 1996. My first granddaughter is part black and so very beautiful. I thought that her father would be the one to teach her what it meant to be black and proud but he is light skinned and he has always been able to pass as other than black and has no interest in teaching her what it black history or what it means to be black in America. He told me that if I wanted her to learn black history that it was up to me. I had just started back to college the year she was born so I began taking black studies classes. And reading more and more, both fiction and non-fiction on being black in America: James Baldwin; Langston Hughes; Zora Neal Hurston; Toni Morrison; Alice Walker; Terry McMillan…I hope that when she begins to ask questions I will be able to hold a dialogue.

Growing up I would never have thought that there was a “black culture.” I just knew that black people were beautiful. When I was in high school it was during the rea of bussing. Kids that would normally have gone to school in San Bruno or in South San Francisco were bussed to Pacifica. Probably doesn’t mean much to you unless you know Pacifica, CA. It is a small beach town about fifteen miles south of San Francisco. The kids that were bussed in were of various ethnic and racial backgrounds but to me they were all just kids. I don’t remember ever distinguishing between skin colors growing up, maybe because I was too well aware that whatever color I was I was still scarred and when I looked at other kids all I saw was the smoothness of their skin. The friends I had were Mexican, black, white, Japanese…they were just my friends. Of the two boyfriends I had in highschool one was Mexican and one was black. I went to their homes and I don’t recall anything standing out that would make them different from my own home. The only home that I remember being surprised by and influenced by during my high school years was that of a Mormon family. So, when I think of black culture I have to go back to books I read. And still I read and I learn.

When I finished highschool and left the little town of Pacifica it was to marry a southern boy from Tennessee and to move clear across the country. This was my first taste of what differences there were in the world and my first inkling that there was a color line in this country. Maybe I was naïve. Or maybe I just didn’t care about color myself and so was surprised when the color line hit me in the face. I moved with my new husband to Knoxville Tennessee and found out that whites lived on one side of town and blacks lived on the other. That was a culture shock. I traveled through parts of the South when I lived back there and I have to say that in some small towns I was appalled at the conditions in which some people lived. I can still see the run down shacks in my mind, those I saw driving through the back country of Georgia, North and South Carolina, and Florida. Not too many months ago I drove around that part of the country again and not much has changed.

White culture is not the same in California as it is in West Virginia. People are not the same. I would imagine that black culture in New Orleans is different than in South Central Los Angelos or from the South Side of Chicago. Puerto Rican’s are not the same as Cubans. People are different and people are the same. Each of us wants to be safe, healthy, and loved. The opportunities available to each of us are of course not the same. We may talk up equality in this country like it is a reality but it is not. I also am aware that as a white woman I don’t know diddly about how the majority of blacks in this country live or about the adversity so many of them face on a day to day basis. I travel and I talk to people and I read but I don’t personally experience it.