What beauties you are, framed in like bone, encased in fragile, diverse, multi-toned flesh. Each Soul delivered to this place helpless yet hopeful. If you’re lucky, you were granted two brown, blue, green, or hazel, “windows” meant to illuminate your world by individual prism. You are Human. Warm or cold, gifted with sight or not, Each Soul here is blessed with free will to decide who we become. We are free to welcome or reject, be proven innocent or guilty, truthful or deceitful, and to love or to hate. Our very human decisions then save, shield, pierce or lay waste other Souls around us, revealing much too often what monsters we can be.
I decided no matter how hidden or open my sins or yours I can never allow you to become my enemy. I truly ache to respect the rhythms and multiplicity of our irrefutably connected lives. Some of you covet only denial of Our Connectedness, you refuse to accept it; your mortal urges lean toward destruction, you welcome none but your own kind. My Soul gives me no choice, I am compelled to love–even you.
When my father died the Certificate of Death cited his origins as “Native American, Spanish and Caucasian.” The stated lineage may have been his but he was also an African-American. My father passed from this life unable or unwilling to accept his own skin.
I wondered what experiences brought him to such denial, self-hatred or shame. I was deeply injured by his rebuff of true self. I read many times over, in painful disbelief, his Declaration of Death. His nonacceptance of self translated to a brutal rejection of five siblings and me. I recalled my very fair skinned mother saying to him long ago, “You love those Crackers. I think you want to be a Cracker.” Mama was born in Elberton, Georgia, in 1935. She was a victim and a product of the very special “southern hospitality” reserved just for her kind. Her characterization of White people was forged in that experience. Into the mid-1960s she called herself “Colored.” I never knew the source of her diluted melanin, but until she became sick she was paler in skin color than some Caucasians. Her attitude however was adamantly pro-Black. These polar extremes apparent in the racial attitudes of my parents were incubated in the belly of a very human monster. The name of the monster is “Hate.”
My father was career military. I grew up in Northern California and entered Woodstock Elementary School in Alameda. Alameda is an island town in the Bay Area, the birthplace of snow cones. The city was predominantly Caucasian and “Navy” all the way. In Alameda, on the beach, at the bowling alley, riding my bike, going to school, I discovered my brown skin would create problematic issues. As I experienced and examined the issues my skin created I thought being anything other than Colored or Black would make my life much more serene. In “child think” I looked often at the palms of my hands, “If I could just change all of my skin to the color of my palms I would have no problems.” Of course I gave no thought to my “pre-Jolie” lips or the wild mass of slightly auburn curls that covered my head. Mama often managed to tame those curls with super tight rubber bands. If my wild hair could be so severely restrained I believed I could scrub off the brown and my life would be easier.
As the years passed I came to see much truth in that belief. My White classmates would not have wounded me with hurtful names. That condescending professor at Southern Cal would have given me the better grade I worked for and deserved. When I relocated to Georgia as a young adult the White property manager in Stone Mountain would have permitted me to rent the apartment closer to my job. She liked me well enough on the phone. I suspect a Bay Area dialect fused with just enough of the Southern twang gleaned from my parents disguised my origins, but the apartment that was available an hour before disappeared when she saw my face. The cop in Alameda would not have taken me at fifteen years of age to the police station under the assumption that I stole my own Schwinn. Why did I clean and shine that damned bike so? White valets, sales people, customer service reps, bankers, co-workers and deli attendants would not attempt to force me into invisibility. The officers from the LAPD who sought black, male suspects from a nearby robbery would not have shoved their weapons into the car as we, two black females sat innocently eating at the wrong time, wrong place. Gun in my face, if I hadn’t held my taco just so, above my head, I might not be here today. The initial headline may have stated, “USC Student Killed by Police.” Then in an effort to exonerate our appointed protectors a new headline would correct, “College Student Smoked Marijuana, Deserved to Die.”
If I had been born into a skin that makes smooth the way along this road called Life would I too have felt entitled, privileged, superior, chosen? Would a White birthright have granted me a gift of “oppressor telepathy” that I could then use to torture rather than be tortured? Or would I have used that birthright to correct wrongs in this world?
By my father’s vigilant choosing as we grew up we resided in neighborhoods where we were always in the minority. When the U.S. Navy assigned him to an aircraft carrier or an air station he carefully chose our homes in Alameda and San Pedro, California with the caveat that we should have Caucasian neighbors. When we lived briefly in Memphis, Tennessee, circa 1966-67 he probably did not have a choice. Even when our family settled finally in Oakland, California, in 1970, my father managed to find a neighborhood that did not become majority Black until we moved away. He did not anticipate that as more Black families bought homes the White families living at the foothills would run for higher ground and beyond. My father might love today’s Oakland. California’s turbulent economy ensures that even my adored, blighted, blot on the golden landscape, West Oakland, will become desirable and diverse if you can afford to live there.
As I grew older, a mature ten or eleven, I reasoned that if I did not have the power to change my skin color perhaps God could grant me a magic wand. Apparently I hadn’t yet come face to face with that thing they call Reality. I remembered the wand from movies and books. That such a magic stick existed just had to be true. If I could just find that freakin’ wand maybe I could use it to change our neighbors and classmates into nicer people. Perhaps we could escape the taunts, “Blackie, Jungle Monkey, Nigger. Why is your name White? It should be Brown. No, no, it should be Black!”
I nobly delivered my one and only little brother to Taper Avenue Elementary on his first day of school. He was anxious but excited. I loved reading. I told him, “School can be fun. There’s a lot to learn. You should put something in that big head besides cookies.” At the end of the day I eagerly retrieved him so we could walk home. He started crying as soon as he saw me. He was called “Fudgesicle” all day. Even being referred to as a brown Popsicle could inflict pain. I guess it was a good pun. The name callers laughed at his tears, but I couldn’t. I never found that magic wand. Believe me, I checked every odd branch fallen among the majestic sequoias and all those that washed up along the beaches of my youth. But I did find a Hella Big Stick. We had no magic so we just learned to fight. Before the school year was over we came upon some of the name callers in a park. I told my brother, “Get off the bike, walk over, push one of them down on the ground and hit him until I say stop.” Although he was hitting with kindergarten- sized fists, a Black man’s life can be one long battle, I am not proud that I told my brother to fight. I knew of nothing else to do.
I was still too young to notice the possibility of true magic in a world that appeared to be changing around me. As a child I didn’t know that God sometimes listens and responds to the tormented. American culture and some of its people began to morph in front of my eyes. As my father continued his desperate assimilation in California a revolution was stirring in the southern states. Mama, knowing her husband found even peaceful dissent unpatriotic, quietly and reverently mentioned a man named “King.” He, among many others would be killed, but change could not be stopped. As I grew even older I heard and read of audacious revolutionaries named Malcolm, Huey, Bobby, Eldridge, and my heroine at thirteen, Angela. I became for a time entrenched, angrier than my mother had ever been, Pro-Black, Pro-Super Afro, Pro-Panther. By my sixteenth birthday my Afro was so big I think my father wanted to shave my head. My father was fearful or he could not understand. I did not want to assimilate. I wanted to actually live, as a Black person, the freedom America promises to all of its citizens. We disagreed on many, many things. But even in my anger and pain I did not become Anti-White or Anti-American. I did not believe the Muslim Brother on the corner in the sharp suit and bow tie when he preached, “White people are the spawn of the devil.” By thirteen I’d met enough people to know that not all of our White Sisters and Brothers hate without reason, cause or conscience. I was, I still am and forever will be…hurt by existing bigotry. I was angry at Hate but I could always see glimpses, flickers and outright humanness among every kind.
When my mother and father divorced he abandoned us to my beloved Oakland. He moved just beyond the Posey Tube to his safe, White sanctuary in Alameda. Initially, I was happy to stay in Oakland. The years passed, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen years old, I began to witness my city’s hostile evolution from prideful and powerful to self-destructing. I recognized the mounting evidence of an intensifying despair, hopelessness, and a systemically stimulated self-hatred among My People. It manifested in a way dissimilar from my father’s racial self-hatred. There were too many absent fathers, drug addicted mothers, and discarded children. I understood, as I was one of the discarded children, and nearly one of the addicts. In the absence of love or acceptance discarded children become oppressed children. Oppressed children can become Oppressors. There were too many children growing up in an ugly void, too many children who would become practiced, adept, angry thieves and fighters. I was saddened but I truly understood.
The children could sense as I had sensed the resentment of their very existence. The children suffered and mourned again and again…for parents who could not embrace them because they couldn’t take care of themselves, for a society that scorned them above all else in the world, for the realization that they lived among other human beings who simply found their black skins repulsive. The children understood that they were hated simply for being. I recognized and still recall the pain of that demoralizing discovery. No matter what you accomplish it never leaves you. As a child I mourned, I cried, then I used my fists many, many times against the name callers. The passage of time brought grace, peace found me, and I outgrew my anger. As an adult I labored to prove again and again that I am Human too. But why should I have to prove that?
Now many of the name callers are preaching from the pulpit, pontificating at the political podium, raging on the radio, dejecting young spirits in the classroom, or dispensing cruel offenses behind the power and protection of a badge. The early promise of change I recalled from my youth appears to be fading and bigotry is gaining strength, intensified by the deluge of Hate. That Hate is evidenced in any form of oppression, in religious, cultural, cerebral or sexual intolerance, misogyny, class warfare and systemic-structural racism. I remember the feeling of being a Hated Child. Hated Children often recognize bigotry and they may respond. Their responses can be frightening. Hated Children can develop an effortless and almost but not quite defensible dismissal of reverence for human life, yours, mine and their own.
As I matured in life and in faith I understood that I do not want to destroy the Oppressors. I certainly do not want to lose our children or goad them further to warrior status. As wounded as I have been by hatred I do not despair. I am witness to a power greater than hate. I want to smother the Oppressors in a very human embrace with that power. That power can rescue Our Children. I want to see evidence of that power igniting the best in all of you. I am hopeful.
Maybe my hope for you was forged by the early lessons from my kindergarten teacher. I never saw a Black teacher at my elementary school in Alameda. My first teacher was White, but she was the best kindergarten teacher in the world because she saw only a child who wanted to learn. She understood that I could not relate to Dick and Jane. She knew that I did not want to be called, “Spot.” She compensated for the world’s cruelty with kindness. Perhaps my hope was emboldened by a lone, thoughtful White neighbor in San Pedro; she nursed my weekly wounds by sharing her massive Elvis LP collection with a twelve- year- old girl who simply loved music. Maybe it was “the music.” The Motown Sound, Marvin Gaye, the Supremes, the Jackson Five, Stevie Wonder, I loved them all and I was not alone in that love. I also loved Mick and the Stones, the Righteous Brothers, the Beatles, Peter, Paul and Mary, the Mamas and the Papas. Even if as rumored, Elvis and the Beach Boys hated me I could not hate them. I love the transformative energy, hope and artistry we can find in music. For some reason I could not and cannot see race when I listen to music, I can only feel.
Maybe it was the wisdom I found in the words of Dr. King, Auney and the Bible. Auney warrants a full explanation, perchance in another letter. She was who and what I could not imagine humans to be. Maybe it was the symbolic hope I saw behind the American flag, which led the military parades I watched as a child. I marveled that I could be alternately or simultaneously so angry, critical, and proud of my country. I lingered even when I wavered, in awe of what I perceive to be the true meaning of America’s democratic foundations, praying, hoping history will prove that Our People truly stood for her most humane principles.
Maybe it was the People I met as my decades sped by: early in life, my wild within adventures with Renee and Joni, later in life having cocktails with Barbara, Teena, Laura, and Beth, working beside Billie, Christine, Linda, Carol, and my favorite lady from Tennessee, Fannie Parris. There were many more, unnamed human beings, People who stood strong, straight and correct. By appearance we were not alike. Inside we all remained those children who long ago “decided to welcome.” Our experiences were significantly different but these very Special People either immediately embraced me or came to understand that I Am as Human as they.
There will always exist among you those who do not, cannot or will not see me as a human being worthy of your acceptance. I will not defile my soul with futile hatred and judgment from intolerant or ignorant people. I will not allow you to become my enemy.
I no longer care as much that I have long been a victim of your bigotry. I care most about how I choose to live. I need only to know with surety that I have lived as I should and loved enough. I will ask myself the Relevant Questions for as long as I live. Have I loved enough when our religion differs? Have I loved enough regardless of your sexuality? Have I loved enough without thought of your origins or the color of your skin? Did I listen beyond your accent? Did I look past your disability to see you? Did I see your humanity? Did I embrace it?
There is no God who advocates bigotry, intolerance or hatred…whether your faith is rooted in Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Mysticism, or Self(ism)…There is only a God who advocates Love. If your hearts, eyes, minds, souls are honestly open to the Word of your God you know that this is Truth.
Truth is what I seek. Love is Truth. I won’t let you get in the way of my Truth. I will not give my God cause to regret that I was made. I will not let the “imagination of my heart remain evil from youth.” I will always expect more of myself, and so much more of you. Acceptance. Patience. Compassion. Empathy. Civility. Gratitude. Forgiveness. A Fearless Love.
As a child I lost the ability to wish, that particular inclination became foreign to me. If I could wish I would wish that we would all seize a collective purpose to seek the divine’s intent. I would wish that we had an appreciation of the abundance that surrounds the fortunate among us. I would wish that we were motivated to share our abundance with the less fortunate.
Dear Humanity, I will always try to see you when you stand before me. Thankfully, I retained the inclination and the ability to pray. I am not asking you to believe what I believe. True Americans don’t do that, but I will pray for all of Us.
I know some of Us will do what is good. I know some of Us will do what is evil. If and when you must do your evil deeds then, “may God make the evil deed into good” to serve God’s higher purpose.
My God’s directive for me is to love you as I love myself. I hope to love you better than that. You know you don’t always make it easy. Still, I will labor to do as I have been told. You need to understand that even if you cannot see it, I am your Sister.
B