“They don’t know what they are talking about. Look at my arm” I demanded as I grabbed the black crayon from out of the box and scribbled my proof frantically on my placemat.
“This crayon is Black! Does that arm look Black to you,” I demonstrated, not at all sure that I was convinced I was right.
When she shook her head “no” I felt so relieved that she seemed to be coming around and that we could finally get back to our cereal and milk.
And,
That’s when it happened.
“Yes you are Black!”
I heard what he said—but I honestly did not want to believe that he could actually be so mis-informed.
Did my father not have eyes? Could he not see that the color of my arm looked nothing like the crayon in the Crayola box? Had he no appreciation that this was, in fact, a two-way conversation?
Denise cried and I hugged her tight. Huddled against the wall in the kitchen, I whispered to her again and again:
“Don’t worry. We are not Black. We're not Black.”
Standing between us and our only way out of this nightmare, my father kept repeating his horrible claim only to eventually surrender with an order to my mother to get us set straight once and for all.
And that is exactly what she did.
She called her friend Marva and the two of them dressed us up in our favorite clothes and took us out for an ice cream sundae. I can still remember the hot fudge as my mother took her time and explained to us that we were beautiful and that -
we were Black.
She said that because we were beautiful that meant that being Black must be a beautiful thing to be.
Her words made a whole lot of sense to me.
The kids at school didn’t understand yet so, they thought Black was bad. My father’s militant anger represented a time and a place. What my mother offered to me was a new way to see but I was the one who had to choose for myself who I am and—
PREVIOUS PAGE
