You speak like a green girl / unsifted in such perilous circumstances. [Hamlet, William Shakespeare]
Naiveté or naivety: lack of experience, wisdom, or judgment. These are the attributes of a green girl moving unsifted through the circumstances of her world. This is me–or rather this has been me for most of my life. Now, however, let the sifting begin.
I am the mother of a black son, the sister of a black brother, the teacher, colleague, and friend to countless blacks. I am green. And white.
Standing in the kitchen of my family home, my mother and I were talking when my brother, age 5, entered. Flushed and sputttering, he asked, What does it mean when someone calls you nigger? I am sure that I must have gasped, but my mother simply turned to her son. She never missed a proverbial beat as she pulled him to a stool, sat him down, and offered up the truest definition a child could fathom. As a college student, I marveled at her composure and compassion, for I was seething with anger at the boys next door. I was certain that they would inevitably grow up to be white supremacists or grand wizards in the KKK or drunken men who drove around with Confederate flag decals on their 4-wheel drive trucks. I wanted to school them in all that was good and right and true. I wanted them to feel the degradation and shame that was exclusively black. I wanted them to pay.
As if I knew or had felt the degradation and shame that was exclusively black. How could a white girl growing up in the middle of Nebraska, green and inexperienced in most ways of the world, ever know this? Was my black brother my ticket to understanding? How about my black basketball player friend/Friday night dance partner? Did my relationships with both give me a leg-up on my white friends and neighbors? What, in fact, were my credentials in the world of race relations?
In How It Feels To Be Colored Me, Zora Neale Hurston writes He has only heard what I felt. Exactly. I had only heard about what others felt. Still, I was much like the young white narrator in Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees. Living in a household of colored women, she felt as though she were living among hidden royalty:
Up until then I’d thought that white people and colored people getting along was the big aim, but after that I decided everybody being colorless together was a better plan. I thought of that policeman, Eddie Hazelwurst, saying I’d lowered myself to be in this house of colored women, and for the very life of me I couldn’t understand how it had turned out this way, how colored women had become the lowest ones on the totem pole. You only had to look at them to see how special they were, like hidden royalty among us. Eddie Hazelwurst. What a shitbucket.
In the presence of my brother and my college friend, I often felt as though I was simply ordinary, while they were splendidly royal and special. And the boys next door? They were shitbuckets. Genuine Eddie Hazelwust shitbuckets. I felt something, though it was not–and could not be–uniquely black.
Through my blue eyes, I did try to see the world as my brother did, to understand what he must have felt when a middle-aged store clerk refused to wait on us in our hometown J. C. Penney’s store. But I was white college girl with a story yet to be told, a veritable novel of promises at my fingertips. How much my life, my very being differed from Toni Morrison’s protagonist in The Bluest Eye:
Here was an ugly little girl asking for beauty….A little black girl who wanted to rise up out of the pit of her blackness and see the world with blue eyes.
As a black woman, Morrison understood the weightlessness of universalism, how it thins the substance of racial differences and how, like water, it ultimately holds no form. In response to critics who chided her for writing about and for black people, she wrote:
I never asked Tolstoy to write for me, a little colored girl in Lorain, Ohio. I never asked [James] Joyce not to mention Catholicism or the world of Dublin. Never. And I don’t know why I should be asked to explain your life to you. We have splendid writers to do that, but I am not one of them. It is that business of being universal, a word hopelessly stripped of meaning for me. Faulkner wrote what I suppose could be called regional literature and had it published all over the world. That’s what I wish to do. If I tried to write a universal novel, it would be water. Behind this question is the suggestion that to write for black people is somehow to diminish the writing. From my perspective there are only black people. When I say ‘people,’ that’s what I mean.
When Morrison says people, she means her people. Black people. Although I have read Morrison’s novels and have found themes and characters that offered me insight into myself and my world, I am painfully aware that she was not writing for me. I might write an essay about the universal themes in Beloved or Sula, but truthfully, such an essay would be more academic exercise than truth.
I don’t see color. I just see people. How many times have I heard people brandish these words as weapons against racism? Too many. I may not have said these words, but I fear that I have thought them–or at least, agreed with them. As my son has grown into a man, however, I have had to try these words with the honesty that has come from his experiences and his insights. In this court of experience, these are words that any black prosecutor worth his or her salt could decimate.
Recently, I heard my son on the phone with one of his college professors. He was calling–again–to ask about his grade from a summer course. His current “D”, the professor had explained months ago, was simply a placeholder until he turned in his final paper. Quinn had turned in his final paper the morning after the midnight deadline last summer. He knew the paper was late and had emailed the professor with his apology. The professor responded and asked him to visit him in his office, to admit blame in person before he would grade his paper. Quinn complied, appearing in his office to admit fault and to respectfully ask if his paper might be graded. When he left, he believed that finally he would see his paper graded, and the placeholder “D” replaced with his legitimate grade. Weeks later, nothing, no change in his grade. He followed up by emailing again and asking, once more, if the professor might grade his paper as he had agreed to do in October. Nothing. When his university advisor told him that the professor asked that he appear in person again, Quinn decided to put the entire ordeal behind him and cut his losses.
A week before he was to graduate, however, he asked me if it was worth another try, since by now an entire semester had gone by. When I encouraged him to try one final time, he made the phone call from our kitchen. I listened as he talked to his professor. My heart swelled with pride as I listened to his respectful tone, his well-considered words, his honest admission–a third time–of his fault in missing the deadline.
But something in me soured the more he talked. From their conversation, I could tell that his professor was searching through past emails for proof that Quinn had, indeed, made contact with him. I heard Quinn recall details of their meeting in his office in a desperate attempt to remind him that he had appeared in person, as requested. Finally, I could deduce that the professor found Quinn’s former emails, which jogged his memory of their office meeting, and the phone conversation ended with his promise to grade his paper and change his final grade.
When Quinn hung up the phone, he shook his head. He wanted me to jump through hoops, to prove that I cared, that I wasn’t just another black athlete on a free ride. He didn’t come right out and say it, but that’s the bottom line. How could he not remember that I stood before him in his office, admitting my fault? How could he not even remember me? I wanted to say because he’s a shitbucket–that’s why, but I didn’t. I took the party line: There are always going to be people–of all colors and persuasions–who refuse to see others. You did the right thing by being respectful and honest.
Two days later, he made good on his promise, and Quinn received a B for the course. Victory? Maybe.
In truth, I knew that I had witnessed my son kowtow to a white man who was jerking him around. To each yes sir, I could imagine his white prof swiveling in his office chair, confident in his power to grant favors. Or not. Would he have made my son beg for his paper to be graded if he were white? Honestly, I don’t know. If I had to make an educated guess based on Quinn’s experience, though, I would say no. There’s a good chance that a white son’s email would have received a timelier response. A white son would probably not have been asked to accept blame in person, not once but twice. And a white son would likely have been remembered.
For Quinn’s entire life, we have hoped that he would be judged for his character and his acts. My husband and I have coached him to be respectful, polite, honest, compassionate, hard-working, faithful, and persistent. We expected him to see through others’ eyes and perspectives before he judges, before he speaks and acts. Like most parents, we simply wanted him to grow into a man of virtue.
But if I were to be brutally honest, I would have to admit that we also told him that he would have to be the bigger man on the athletic field, in the classroom and workplace, and in general. I would have to admit that I cautioned him about driving a nice car with window tint, warning that he may be targeted as a young black man (and he was–three times by the same officer). And I would have to confess that, as a college student, I worried that, to some, he would be just another black athlete majoring in football and to others, a dark-skinned man with a white soul, a white family, and no legitimate place among his black peers.
As a baby, Quinn solicited many head-pats, coos, comments and questions. What a head of hair he has! How good of you to do this [adopt a black child]. Are you babysitting? A foster parent? What does his father look like? Quinn and I took it in stride. He allowed perfect strangers to pat his afroed head, to literally get in his face in an attempt to make him smile, and to touch him. I accepted questions and comments that could have been offensive but ones that I shrugged off as well-intentioned but ignorant. I embraced my role as ambassador of something wholly unique in rural Iowa: a white mother who had chosen to adopt a black son.
On several occasions, people would ask where Quinn came from. When I identified our adoption agency, they persisted with but where did he come from? I would smile and answer, Georgia. Columbus, Georgia. It took several occasions like this for me to realize that when these people didn’t respond, their silence was disappointment–at best–and disapproval–at worst. In my arms, they hoped to see a poor black orphan from Zimbabwe or the Sudan. They wanted to affirm the missionary work that my family had undertaken. In their eyes, a black child from Africa was simply acceptable in a way that an American black child was not.
In my greeness, however, I chalked such interactions off to their loss. What they could not or would not understand was just too bad. Because I had been unsifted in such perilous circumstances, I excused others for their ignorance and excused myself for my restraint. I could have given them a piece of my mind, but I didn’t. Certainly, this was the more civil position. After all, I was not going to change the minds and hearts of such ignorance. Was I?
I just finished listening to Jodi Picoult’s novel, Small Great Things. As I drove, I listened to others narrate her book, their voices bringing her characters to life for me in unexpected ways. This is the story of veteran black labor and delivery nurse, Ruth, who is raising her son on her own after her husband was killed in Afghanistan. Forbidden by a white supremacist couple to touch their newborn son, she is removed from their case. When the white nurse charged with his care is called away on a medical emergency, she asks Ruth to watch the baby momentarily until she returns. Clearly uncomfortable and fearing for her job, Ruth consents but hopes that no one–especially the baby’s racist parents–will see her. Within moments, however, the baby appears to be lifeless, ashen and still. With the other nurses and doctors attending to the emergency, there is no one to call. And so Ruth jostles the infant, hoping he will breathe again. He doesn’t, and when she hears noise in the hallway, she quickly re-swaddles the baby and steps back from the bassinet.
The head nurse who arrives quickly calls a code, but in spite of everyone’s (including Ruth’s) best efforts, the baby dies. Days later, the parents file a lawsuit against Ruth, who is charged with murder. The narrative is largely Ruth’s as she faces the loss of her job, her friends, and her dignity in the face of a murder trial. Her white public defender, Kennedy, is confident of the fact that she does not see color, that she has defended and understood other blacks, but that the trial must be about creating reasonable doubt as to the baby’s death–not race, never race. As the trial comes to a close, Ruth finally confronts her lawyer and says:
You say you don’t see color…but that’s all you see. You’re so hyperaware of it, and of trying to look like you aren’t prejudiced, you can’t even understand that when you say race doesn’t matter all I hear is you dismissing what I’ve felt, what I’ve lived, what it’s like to be put down because of the color of my skin.
This is a popular novel–not a book you will find on an university syllabus. Still, there were moments in my car that I simply sat there, taking in Ruth’s words and knowing that I did not know. When Kennedy spoke, I cringed. In many scenes, her voice could have been mine, dismissing what blacks have felt and lived under the guise of my colorblind care. When Ruth spoke of the dreams she had for her son, Edison, I saw my son’s life spill out before me. And once, my car idling in the HyVee parking lot as I listened, I actually teared up and wondered if Ruth could be for Quinn what I could not.
Ultimately, Ruth saw that her dark skin–not her character, her education, or the life she had built–would define her:
On one side of the seesaw is my education. My nursing certification. My twenty years of service at the hospital. My neat little home. My spotless RAV4. My National Honor Society-inductee son. All of these building blocks of my existence, and yet the only quality straddling the other side is so hulking and dense that it tips the balance every time: my brown skin.
In my naivety and out of my great love, I tried to tip the balance towards all of those attributes which make Quinn the man he is. But I failed to honestly acknowledge that his blackness may–at times–tip the balance in spite of all he has become. I failed to see how hulking and dense this may be for him. I played the Pollyanna because I desperately wanted the world to be a kinder, better, more equitable place for him, for my brother, and for all those who have had the balance of their lives tipped towards what others believe them to be.
Of one thing I am certain: I am white, and I am green. This doesn’t excuse me from trying to understand, from actively listening, and from feeling–to the extent that I can–what others feel. But it does remind me that I must see color. My refusal to do so is dishonest and adolescent.
Neither, however, will I claim victim status or ask for special treatment for my black son. I will not excuse his sins as inevitable products of white oppression. I will not condone general retaliation or blanket resentment against whites because they are not black and because their great, great grandparents may–or may not–have been slaveholders.
Undoubtedly, I will spend the rest of my life acknowledging what I do not and cannot know about being black, while continuing to hold my son accountable for living a godly life. And I can take solace in the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., who always held out hope for the kind of world I wish for my son and brother, for all of us:
I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality… I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word.
