Mom folded the San Francisco Chronicle in half, Herb Caen's column facing up so Aunt Ginger could read it later.
“Here, Jody.” Aunt Nita handed Mom a plastic tumbler of iced tea. “What happened that night, Saunders?”
“Well, we were touring the South. My manager and valet drove with me in the Lincoln. The other band members were in another car. When we arrived in Nashville, my manager paid the Musicians' Union so we could play. But when we reached the nightclub, something wasn't right.”
“Wasn't Eddie Taylor in your band then?” Nita stood in the archway, clutching her glass of tea, her nails painted red like fire. “I sure loved the way he played that sax.”
Dad smiled. “Yes, Eddie was there. His was the first face I saw when we walked into the room. That's how I knew something was wrong. He pulled me aside and told me the owner of the club, Mr. Casey, was going to put a rope down the center of the dance floor to separate the whites and Negroes.”
“What year was that, Saunders?” Mom liked to know numbers.
“Let's see.” Dad whistled. “1944, 1945.” His eyes trailed off, and then settled on me. “You took your life in your hands going down South for any reason. That's why my mother and father left Louisiana. I would rather raise Cain than take a backseat because of my race. They had to give it to me right, or not at all.”
Aunt Nita sat down at the end of the table. “What did you do, Saunders?” She made her eyes bug out as she did when Dad sang her favorite songs, and big tears plopped into her martini. “My manager was still back at the hotel and I was too hot to wait for him. I told Eddie I was going to talk to Casey. He wanted to go with me. We walked to the office in back, and I set my guitar on the floor. Casey asked what I wanted. I told him, ‘Mr. Taylor tells me you're thinking about stretching a rope across the dance floor to segregate the Negroes.’ I stared deep into his eyes to let him know I could see his soul. I told him, ‘I don't play to segregated audiences. Never have. Never will.’
“What if he had told you to take your band and leave?” Nita's voice was soft.
“I knew he could throw me out or call the police. But we could work in other cities. We didn't need to stay in Tennessee. It wasn't the first time I had to stand up to racism. I had almost been shot in El Paso when the sheriff called me off a Greyhound bus because I wasn't sitting in the back.”
I swallowed hard and shifted in Aunt Ginger's arms. She squeezed me around the waist, and I could smell the sweet scent of her Juicy Fruit gum. “Are you okay?” she whispered in my ear.
Mom looked over and waved me to her lap. I ran to her and snuggled into her arms, my body trembling.
Dad made a clicking sound with his tongue against his teeth and said, “Mr. Casey just stared at me, so I picked up my guitar and walked back across the dance floor. Eddie Taylor followed close behind. I took long, slow steps so Casey could catch up if he wanted. ‘Saunders!’ he called. He was excited, all right. He told me, ‘We have two hundred people arriving in an hour. You can't leave.’ I stopped. I was too mad to turn around. I wanted to take a swing at him. I could feel perspiration dripping down my back. I turned to Casey and said, ‘Man, I don't play to segregated audiences anywhere. You want my band—no rope.’
Dad pulled a white handkerchief out of his pants pocket and patted his forehead. Every word stuck right to my heart. I knew that what had happened to Dad in Tennessee was a lesson for me.
Aunt Nita's voice cut in: “If you hadn't gone back, your musicians would have followed you.”
“Oh yes,” Dad said, “they surely would have left with me. They were watching the action. Their rights were hanging, too.”
Mom hugged me tighter. “I hate these stories about the South. The ‘Jim Crow’ laws were horrible. Saunders, you had too many close calls.”
“Quite a few serious close calls,” Dad said. “I had a terrific temper, too. But we wanted to work, we wanted to play.”
“So, what happened?” Aunt Nita swirled her ice cubes and stared at Dad.
He smiled. “They took the rope down. We made the place jump that night, and we got out of there.”
“Let's have a drink,” Aunt Ginger said. She and Aunt Nita stood up to make their afternoon cocktails.
I sat ice-cold in Mom's lap. My heart pounded in my chest.
Dad's story reminded me of something that had happened to me. Hearing how those people had wanted to separate blacks and whites made me remember a bad experience I'd had last semester. I had been skipping into the yard at San Miguel Elementary School, going to my third-grade class. I waved good-bye to Kitsaun, and she turned to go across the playground. A group of older kids leaned against the fence. After I passed them, a girl hissed in the meanest voice I had ever heard: “Your mama's as white as day, and your daddy's as black as night.”
Then one of them snorted, and there was a burst of evil laughter.
I skipped faster. My legs wobbled, but I didn't look back. I ran into school, hot tears pooling in my eyes as I pictured Mom and Dad.
“Your mama's as white as day. Your daddy's as black as night.” What was wrong with Mom and Dad being different skin colors? I stumbled into the back of my classroom and leaned into my cubby, shaking. I closed my eyes and imagined Mom's brown eyes crinkled in love when she brushed my hair, as I watched in the mirror. Her skin—yes, now I see—her skin is white. No, not white; it's creamy, like French vanilla ice cream. Dad's skin is dark like nighttime, his white teeth like starlight. He's the color of songs.
Outside, the principal rang the hand bell. Kids' voices came closer. I wanted the cubby to swallow me, to make the fire exploding in my heart go away. I rubbed my sleeve across my face. Your mama's as white as day. Your daddy's as black as night.
I hated those kids. I had never thought of my parents as colors. They were Mom and Dad. Mysteries and music.
My classmates had come into the cloakroom with me. Steven Chin hung his jacket on a hook, pushed his glasses up on his nose, and walked to his desk on the other side of our cubbies. Sharon Rodgers tossed her thick braids over her shoulders and smiled at me. Her skin was light brown—like mine. I untied the knot beneath my chin and slid my scarf off my head, wadding the fabric into a soft ball like the one in my stomach. I dropped it on the floor next to my lunch and carried my schoolbooks to my desk. The teacher was calling roll.
“Deborah King.”
“Here,” I murmured, sitting tall in my chair—a picture of night meeting day hanging before me.
The whole day, I careened through space, unable to stop trembling, feeling as though I were spinning round and round. Every child became a color: my best friend, Karmen, brown; Janet, white; Steven, ivory.
Kitsaun and I walked home from school. I quietly stepped where she stepped, but I didn't tell her what had happened. I didn't ask her to interpret the mean words, and I didn't want her to feel the crushing pain of the realization that Mom and Dad were different from everyone else's parents. I felt like those kids were going to beat me up because of my parents' skin colors.
Dad was sitting on the couch when we arrived home. He told us to wash our hands, and he gave Kitsaun and me red apples. Mom cooked hamburger patties for dinner. Nothing was different at home except my vision of every color in my life. When Mom tucked me in, I told her what the kids had said to me. She sat on the edge of my bed, her soft hands tracing my eyebrows, my cheeks. Kitsaun was brushing her teeth in the small bathroom between our room and Mom and Dad's. I tried not to cry, but my lips quivered and my eyes watered.
“Oh honey,” Mom said, “people see things very differently. Your father and I married because we love each other, not because of what we look like. Those children don't know the first thing about love. Don't let their ignorance hurt you.” Kitsaun ran into our room and jumped onto her bed, her dark curls flying. She had heard everything: “Show me who said it,” she said, raising her fists like a fighter and punching the air. “I'll tell them a thing or two.”
The next day, Dad came to schoo
l to pick me up. I saw him standing in the schoolyard outside the principal's office as I came down the stairs. He looked taller than usual. His black skin glistened like cold lava. His mouth was pulled tight, his eyes dark.
“Dad!” I called out. His lips opened, showing those bright white teeth. He walked his cool strut toward me as kids half his height poured out through the doorways.
“Hi, Dobs,” he said, taking my hand in his.
“What are you doing here, Dad?”
“I wanted to see if those children had anything else to say to you today. Do you see any of them here? Did they bother you this morning?” Mom must have told Dad what happened.
“No, Dad. I don't even know who said it.” I didn't tell him that I had stayed close to a teacher all day.
“Well, if anyone ever says anything like that to you again, or tries to hurt you, just pick up a brick and hit 'em over the head.” Dad always told Kitsaun and me to pick up a brick if anyone tried to harm us, as though bricks lay along every San Francisco street, ready for our use.
I looked up into his face. His mustache twitched, and he squeezed my hand. “Let's get you and your sister some ice cream, okay?”
We waited for Kitsaun to come out. Dad began to whistle in a full, beautiful, bird-like warble that rose above the school yard and carried me with it.
Dad's Tennessee story showed me that those kids had tried to stretch a rope down the center of me. They had tried to divide me in half because my parents had two different skin colors. Now I knew I did not need to feel less human or ashamed of being different. Like Dad, I was going to have to stand up to racism and unfairness. I wished I had been brave like Dad and had marched up to them and looked straight into their ugly, crossed eyes and said, “You're ignorant. What somebody looks like on the outside doesn't have anything to do with who they are inside.”
But, even if I had said it, I would not have been able to make the picture of my family colorless again. One side was black. One side was white. I stood in the middle.
I never forgot what those children said to me. Their judgment tainted how I looked at the world and taught me how the world looked at me. Every night our family watched news reports of failed attempts to integrate the South. The violence confirmed white America's objection to my heritage. I sought to make my biracial identity an asset to my philosophy of life, to rise above the perception that it was a negative. With passing years, I strongly believed that my soul had chosen my mixed ethnicity to share with others a conviction of equality for all. I identified with my African-American ancestors who were brutally and inhumanely treated through slavery, segregation, and Jim Crow laws. I felt compassion and oneness with my Irish ancestors—more than one million had perished in the potato famine. Which survivor, through her blood, had passed on to me the will to live? My grandparents had been persecuted because of their color, my parents spat upon for crossing an invisible color line. Kitsaun and I were asked “What are you?” more than “What's your name?” or “How are you?” People wanted us to label ourselves as something they could understand.
When our daughter, Stella, turned eight, she was invited to a birthday party on our street. One of the children asked the girl who had invited Stella why she had invited a black girl. Stella's skin is the hue of an ivory tusk, a maple leaf just turning from green in the fall; it is the soft yellow of a warm corn tortilla. But the child had probably seen my skin and pulled way back into centuries of racism to deny Stella access to the life she was enjoying. When Stella came home, tears of indignation streaked across her face, I held her in my arms and explained society's cultural ignorance, the centuries of racism living in people's blood and how, no matter what anyone else's perception of her could ever be, she is a beautiful creation of God, equal to everyone else. I sat back from her and looked into her eyes. “Today is an example of what lies ahead. You will have to work harder, fight to get where you want to be, and deny racism your whole life. Not just for you, but for all people who are different from what society pretends is America.” Anger surged through me as I thought of every incident of racism I had ever endured or witnessed. It was painful to see the same prejudice I had experienced thirty years earlier inflicted on my child.
I have been given a gift in who I am. Each person is a repository of identities, ancestral blood, beliefs, revelations, and grace. We are our skin, but so much more.
hen I was twelve, our family moved over the hill from Majestic Avenue to Harold Avenue. My best friend, Karmen, and her family lived on Harold, too, and she and I walked to James Denman Junior High together every morning. Our friends were Chinese, Filipina, Latina, Greek, black, and white. We mixed because of our similarities, not our differences. I adjusted to a color-conscious world that rejected dark skin; I knew that I would have to fight for anything I wanted. At night we watched the news and followed the civil rights movement led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. We knew the future of people of color was at the heart of striving for our legal stake in America's society.
In spite of the social turmoil, my immediate concerns were with my father and boys. When I came home from school, Dad would be in the yellow chair by the living room window, bent over his guitar, tapping a 4/4 rhythm with his foot while he strummed mellow blues chords. He watched Kitsaun and me closely, not wanting as much as a feather to touch us if it could undermine our strength.
One day, I came home an hour late. I waved hello to Dad, who widened his eyes in greeting as he sang with gentle vibrato, “What's your story, morning glory, what makes you feel so blue?” His black hair, pressed into wavy curls, topped his round face, perfect eyebrows, and bushy mustache. I closed the door, hung my coat on the hall closet doorknob, dumped my schoolbooks on the dinette table, and set my viola case on the floor.
“You're late, Deb,” he called.
“We had cheerleading practice,” I answered, sticking my head inside the refrigerator.
Dad grunted. Really I was late because I had waited to catch a glimpse of Arnzy, hoping the eighth grader would talk to me again—me, a seventh-grade cheerleader with skinny legs who was “first chair” viola in orchestra. He had smiled at me after fourth period and walked me to gym class the week before. I took a cold chicken thigh and a slice of corn bread to my room and flopped onto my bed.
Arnzy must have left before I reached my locker. I missed the shiver that rolled through my stomach when he smiled at me. His skin was like mine, his hair kinky and dark. Kitsaun— always correcting me with her ninth-grade smarts—told me he was a punk with a pretty face. But it didn't matter, I was smitten.
Dad's tunes serenaded me as I ate my chicken. I wished Arnzy would hold my hand. Dad would never let me date him. He glared if I talked to our neighbor Danny up the street. It was as though, with boys, Kitsaun and I had to keep moving or they would do something bad to us. Dad would never understand my being in love, so I hid it from him. I could talk to Mom about anything, but Dad was not easily approachable. Wary of anything outside our front door, Dad did not trust all of our friends or their motives, and he watched carefully any boy who came over. He did not tell us why; and as a teenager, I sometimes thought he was mean and too gruff.
If I said I was going up the street to Danny's or Johnny's, Dad said, “You don't need to go to his house. He can come over here.”
“He won't let us do anything!” Kitsaun and I wailed to Mom.
“Your father wasn't raised to be at other people's houses. They were a church family who stuck close together and had strict rules,” she explained.
Kitsaun and I fought with Mom and Dad to let us go places with our friends. Their response was always, “If all of your friends jump off a cliff, are you going to follow them? Think for yourselves, girls.”
There was not much trouble I could get into, anyway. Hawkeyed Dad was home every afternoon before late-night gigs with his trio at a nightclub in Sunnyvale. We did not have friends over because we had homework. I practiced my viola, and Kitsaun went to dance lessons. Kitsaun and I began b
allet and tap when I was five and she was seven. We wore black Dan-skin leotards with soft pink leather ballet slippers and changed to shiny black patent-leather tap shoes to make noise. Kitsaun's steps were fluid and her long arms graceful, and I tried to mimic her grace. We started piano a few years later; it was easier for me to reach my fingers across the keys than move my feet, so I stopped dancing. Kitsaun stopped piano, and we flew after different dreams.
Even at thirteen, I hoped Arnzy and I would date when I was older. I imagined him driving me to dances and kissing me in the front seat of his car. My heart stirred with longings.
I picked up my Nancy Drew mystery, knowing that I should get my schoolbooks off the dinette table and start my homework before Mom got home. Mom worked downtown at her government job until five o'clock, but she always called to check in by four. Dad's voice sang from the living room, “What a life, trying to live without you.”
I listened to his beautiful tone, so soothing to my life. Dad's music drifted through every room of our house; his love of jazz became a living expression of our emotions and spilled from baseboards and light fixtures every moment we were awake. Mom sang, too—soft gospel tunes when she cooked and while we fell asleep; hymns that told us “everything would be all right by and by.” Art Tatum, Louie, Miles, and Billie serenaded us from our Motorola record player. I loved to take the twelve-inch black plastic discs from their waxed-paper shells, hold them by their edges until they were around the steel pin on the turntable, and then gently drop the stylus between the grooves. When I was home alone I would sing along with Morgana King and Nina Simone, standing in front of our picture window— the living room my stage, our view to San Francisco Bay my audience. I belted out ballads, hitting high notes with outstretched arms and grinding out low ones with a swing of my hips. I ended every song with a bow, as though imaginary fans were wildly applauding.
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