It was sticky hot at nine o’clock that morning in Greenville, South Carolina. I was in my office, a corporate outpost in a sparsely settled section of town, sitting on a sleepy two-lane road dotted with intermittent nondescript buildings, a gas station, and thick rows of crops in patchwork fields. I readied files for customer appointments and stuffed them into my briefcase.
As I ran down the outdoor steps to the company car, the sweat on my back stuck my sheath dress to me like a bathing suit. When the car’s air-conditioning kicked in, I mopped myself up with a wad of Kleenex and tried to smooth my hair, now rising like a dandelion seed head.
At the gas station across the road where the company had an account, the white gas man sauntered over. With a head bob and a grin, he started the fill-up. While pretending to wash the windshield, he stared through it instead, sizing me up, leaving water streaks across the glass.
It was the mid-1970s, when civil rights gains hadn’t sunk in much in the small-town South. I had to ask myself what a black New Yorker like me was doing in that foreign land of rifle racks in pickup trucks, proudly displayed Confederate flags, and a local university that didn’t let blacks set foot on campus. I was twenty-six and had moved there with my husband despite my father’s warning that I didn’t understand the ways of the South, the South his family had escaped in the 1930s during the Great Migration. But I was a love-struck bride, so I went anyway, thinking my husband’s better job was our step up.
The gas man replaced the nozzle and came around to the driver’s side. As I started the engine, ready to sign the bill, he stuck his head too close to my open window.
“You been comin’ in here regular, gal,” he said, his stale smoker’s breath so strong I turned my head a moment. “I been a-looking at you and a-wondering, what are you anyway? You Spanish?”
“No.” I refused to meet his eyes.
“Eye-talian, right? You’re Eye-talian.”
“No.” How I hated it when people started this guessing game about which box my looks fit in.
“Injun?”
“No.”
“You ain’t a Jew, is you?”
“No.”
“Then what? Tell me.”
“Black,” I said loudly to the windshield. “I’m black.”
He whooped and jumped back from the car, then cupped his hands and yelled across the pumps to another attendant. “Hey Joe, come here and lookit this gal. She says she black.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a middle-aged white woman in an old Chevy at the next pump turn, craning to see what he was talking about.
“Get on out of that car so I can take a good look at you,” he said, talking to me in a tone I imagined he saved just for blacks, demanding and superior, as though I had to obey. He reached for the driver’s door handle to pull it open.
I swung my head around and faced him.
“You better step the hell out of the way if you don’t want your foot run over.” I hit the gas and fled the station.
But I couldn’t flee the nerve he’d struck. I’d pulled up and out from my childhood ghetto, where we lived in a flat with a coal-burning stove, cringing from my black father when he raged about the racists on his job. And yet, people still challenged my identity and tried to place me outside who I knew I was. Because my light skin is beyond their binary understanding of race in the United States.
But blackness was my essence. I reveled in it; loved jive talk, grew up to diligently object to racism, from store clerks following my husband on suspicion of stealing, to corporate foot-dragging on hiring blacks. With black people—my people—I could be myself, safe from harassment or having to filter myself for white people’s benefit.
There in that South Carolina gas station, I was black, according to my family, society’s one-drop rule, and my government-issued birth certificate. It was culturally and legally ridiculous to wonder if I wasn’t. Because the biological fact of my birth was completely beside the point and counted for nothing.
My beloved mother is white.