“Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can anyone deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It’s beyond me.”
—Zora Neale Hurston
I tried to change my skin color right away, almost from the first time I noticed it.
My parents decided to move to Miami from Quincy when I was three years old, convinced I would receive a better education in a big city than I would in the quiet, rustic area of my mother’s birth. There were no schools in Quincy that could take me. Mom loved living in Quincy, with its moss-draped trees and red clay roads steeped in family history, but Mom and Dad already had two children by 1968, and they considered us their first priority. My grandmother, whom I called Mother, had also moved back to Miami by then, and she would be invaluable in giving our growing family added support. So we moved.
Because I needed to be at least five to enroll in kindergarten in Dade County’s public school system, my mother began to apply to Montessori and other private schools. My grandmother was working, so Mom had to take me with her when she visited several schools by driving around town in the family station wagon. I watched curiously as the white children played on the school jungle gyms, wondering if I would be joining them soon. But at each school, we got the same answer from administrators with pinched, pale faces: Whites only.
I already had a solution in mind. Once we were back home, I found a bottle of Johnson & Johnson baby powder, poured the powder into my hand, and began to pat it on my face. Then my neck. Then, stretching my arms out one by one, I patted the powder onto each of them until they were covered. I took off all my clothes and dusted myself from head to toe.
I was proud of myself. “Mommy!” I called, excited, from the crib I still slept in because my mother—never one to follow convention for its own sake—had never seen a need to replace it. “Will they let me go to school now?”
I’m sure I didn’t understand why my mother suddenly looked so stricken. I was her first child, only three years old, and I’d already been infected by the racism she’d spent her entire adult life trying to fight, as if racism were a stranger who’d entered our home despite all the locks on the doors. I already wanted to change who I was so the outside world would be willing to accept me. Okay, so I had to be white to go to school. That was easy enough to fix!
As far as I was concerned, my mother and grandmother were white, anyway. I was richly brown-skinned like my father, but my mother was a golden peanut color, and her mother was even lighter, the color of a peanut shell. Even my baby sister, Johnita, had coloring closer to my mother’s than my own. These variances in shading had not meant anything in particular to me until the day I covered myself with powder. Suddenly, I saw my complexion with a more critical eye. I needed to be white like Mommy and Mother, and everything would be fine.
My sisters and I were the children of integration. My mother and grandmother’s generations had grown up in a very segregated setting, as had nearly all Southern blacks since we first arrived on this nation’s shores, but my sisters and I were born after the Civil Rights Act, after the Voting Rights Act, the first generation of so-called “Freedom.” In many ways, we were the testing ground for the ideals my parents had been sacrificing their time and lives for.
While my parents didn’t set out on purpose to raise us in a nearly all-white setting when we were very young, that was the end result. We lived in three mostly black neighborhoods in Miami for a time—we rented homes in Liberty City and Opa-locka, and later we rented a house from relatives in middle-class, black Richmond Heights, closer to my grandmother—but eventually my parents were ready to buy a house, and they found themselves stymied. Black families have always cherished property because it was denied us for so long, and my parents were unable to find families willing to sell their homes in the mostly black neighborhoods that appealed to them. Instead, they took their home search to suburbia, and we ended up in the land of whites.
We did not feel welcome there. My parents shielded us from the direct threats some of our neighbors made—like one in particular who dumped his garbage in our backyard and vowed to shoot me or my sisters if he saw us walking on his grass, and was, ironically, father to one of my favorite playmates—but we felt the unspoken effects of intimidation. We knew when tomatoes or eggs had been thrown against our house. Or when someone had put rocks in my father’s gas tank overnight. Or when stones were thrown against our house, making me wonder if one would shatter a window and come flying into my bedroom. More than my sisters, I was also subjected to the pain of the word “nigger,” for which I never had a comeback. That was a word that had been used by slaveholders and murderous mobs. Nigger was not a word I took lightly.
We were even surrounded by whites at church. Both Mom and Dad had African Methodist Episcopal backgrounds, but in the 1960s my father had been intrigued by the Unitarian Universalists—a more informal version of Christianity once supported by Thomas Jefferson, among others. Unitarian churches accept members of all faiths; the religious aspect is left much more to individual rumination, and sermons tend to reflect broad ideas such as peace and social activism. Unitarians in Tallahassee had been very supportive of civil rights, since many of them were politically active white liberals, I had been dedicated at the Unitarian Church, and there was a Unitarian Universalist church in Miami. At our church altar were large paintings of a Christian cross, a Jewish Star of David, and a Yin and Yang, all side-by-side, showing the church’s sense of inclusion. But this was not a traditional church, and most of the members, many of whom wore shorts and sandals to services, were white. I can think of only one other black family at our church, and they, like most Unitarians we knew, attended Sunday services only sporadically.
Quite by accident, I had also ended up at a mostly white private school in Miami. A woman named Nancy Adams, a dear friend of my mother’s from the civil rights movement, arranged for me and Johnita to receive scholarships to the Horizon School for Gifted Children. Horizon was run by Dr. Benjamin Fine, a progressive thinker in gifted education. Nancy was convinced that the three of us were truly special children, although my youngest sister, Lydia, was not old enough to attend the school. Nancy paid for our first year out of her own pocket, which at the time was more than $1,000 each. Because our parents had done so much for others, she wanted to make sure their children would have advantages in life. The curriculum specialized in bright children, and Mom thought it would give me and my sister the best start. I have no recollection of any other black children at the Horizon School except my sister—although my mother reminds me that a Miami Herald newspaper reporter, Bea Hines, had a son there, and my godmother, Florida Rep. Gwendolyn S. Cherry, had a niece there—although they were much older than we were.
When I was in the second or third grade, a boy in my class asked me, “What color is black people’s blood?” It was the most ridiculous question I could imagine. “It’s green,” I lied, completely straight-faced. I think he believed me.
Despite my realization that many whites were apparently ignorant about black people, I could not help constantly noticing our differences and comparing myself unfavorably to whites. I remember draping a bath towel across my head and swinging it back and forth as if the towel represented my long tresses of hair, imitating the white women I saw on television and the long-haired white girls at my school. I might have forgotten all about this fantasy except for Whoopi Goldberg, who, reliving her own childhood during her one-woman show on Broadway many years ago, put a towel on her head and did the exact same thing. It brought the memory back like a thunderclap.
I hated my wiry, unmanageable hair. I hated getting my hair combed and greased. I hated driving into West Perrine, a nearby black neighborhood where some of the homes were unsettling to me in their shabbiness, to go to the beauty shop. The beauty shop didn’t have air-conditioning, so it was always hot and filled with sour-faced strangers, and the radio was always preaching about Jesus instead of playing music. “You better stop being so tenderheaded,” my hairdresser said when I cried out in pain, either from a sharp yank or, sometimes, a burn from her pressing comb. On a few occasions, my mother sat me on a kitchen stool at home and tried to straighten my hair herself, heating up the big burner until it was a glowing red coil, filling the house with the sweet scent of hair oil and the sour scent of singed hair. Once, she burned the top of my earlobe so badly that the dark crust of a scab was visible for days, though usually the burns weren’t so obvious. “Oh, darling, I’m so sorry!” Mom always exclaimed. I was thankful that my sisters and I only had our hair straightened for special occasions, such as Easter. Then, of course, once the hair was straight, it had to be treated oh-so gingerly, which meant that if my school took a field trip to a public pool, I had to wear a swimming cap and keep my head above the surface because I could not get my hair wet. It was hard to enjoy the pool at all, I was so worried about my hair. I couldn’t stand having kinky hair, and I couldn’t stand having it straightened. I couldn’t stand my hair hardly at all.
I combed my Barbie dolls’ hair with a burning sense of envy. Almost all of my dolls were black, including my Barbies—to her immense credit, Mom saw to that, even if she had to travel far and wide to find them—but while Barbie’s skin may have been the some color as mine, her features and hair looked more like a white woman’s. Her hair was so soft, so silky. And, best of all, it was so lonnng, hanging down as far as her waist. Barbie didn’t need a towel on her head. Barbie’s hair blew in the breeze.
My mother did her best to combat my hair envy. “White people’s hair is very thin, and it tangles easily,” she told me once. Another time she said, “Well, white children are more liable to get hair lice. The oil black people put in their hair keeps the lice away.” I took small comfort in those bits of information. But in a world full of girls with long, soft hair, where even my Barbie dolls were traitors, sometimes it was very little comfort.
Of course, I noticed other differences, too. Sometimes my father took me with him when he went to his meetings in Miami’s black neighborhoods, like Liberty City and Overtown, and I noticed the stark contrast between those neighborhoods and the ones where my more affluent friends from the Horizon School lived. I saw black children playing barefoot in the street, and it troubled me. “Are all black people poor?” I asked my parents. They assured me that this was not the case, but that because of discrimination there has always been more poverty in the black community. In fact, I remember my parents specifically taking me to black neighborhoods in disrepair to show me how many blacks live (“The real Miami,” my mother always called it), so I would know how fortunate we were. We were not rich, we were told, but we were lucky.
I also noticed social differences between blacks and whites. Sometimes, I actually saw my white friends and classmates yelling at their parents, which would have been a catastrophe in my home. My sisters and I were not beaten, but my parents were very strict and, if we were especially bad, we could expect to be instructed to find a leather belt and bring it to my mother. Her little slaps with a belt against our palms were intended much more for symbolic ritual than actual pain, but my sisters and I lived in fear of it. We did not yell at our parents. Not once.
I had a good friend named Paul, a blond-haired stick figure of a boy with a sweet smile who, with the exception of my best friend Dorothy, was my favorite person at the Horizon School. I think we were fourth-graders together. When he invited me to his birthday party at his home, I was amazed to learn that he addressed his parents by their first names. “Thanks, Bill. Thanks, Sue.” My jaw nearly fell to the floor. Paul seemed to have much higher standing in his home than I had in mine; instead of being parents and a child, they all appeared to be buddies just hanging out. Inspired, I went home and asked my parents if I could call them “Patricia” and “John.”
This was the first of many times I would receive my parents’ lecture on the differences between white culture and black culture, which were probably more stark than ever in the aftermath of the hippie generation. Some whites, especially liberals, were much more informal than most blacks, my parents explained. Their ideas on discipline were different. Their ideas on child rearing were different. That was why the dress code at our Unitarian church was so different from when we attended Mother’s AME church in Richmond Heights, where the black worshipers wore pretty dresses, hats, and suits and ties, and why the AME services were so emotional while the Unitarian services were so sedate.
Needless to say, I never called my parents “Patricia” and “John.”
It may sound as if my parents set me and my sisters out upon the sea of whiteness without any kind of cultural life raft, but that’s actually far from true. They were well aware of the nutrients we were not receiving from our outside experiences, and I know they agonized over it, so my mother in particular made it her mission to teach us who we were. In a sense, although we attended school, we were also homeschooled.
Our home bookshelves were always full of books. Like many children, I started on the Golden Books and Grimm’s Fairy Tales and then moved up to Little House on the Prairie and Nancy Drew mysteries, but my mother also searched very carefully for the kind of books she thought would educate and enrich us culturally. She bought us Ezra Jack Keats’s books illustrated with brown-faced children, like A Snowy Day, Whistle for Willie, and John Henry: An American Legend. We had a wonderful coloring book filled with black historical figures called Color Me Brown, published by Ebony magazine, and we subscribed to a now-defunct magazine designed for black children, called Ebony Jr! We had comic books about Nat Love and other black cowboys, and on Sojourner Truth and the amazing Harriet Tubman, who had sometimes held slaves she was leading to freedom at gunpoint rather than allow them to turn back and jeopardize everyone in her party. We had illustrated books on different Native American tribes (including the Cherokees, who, our father told us, shared our bloodline on his side). And we had children’s history books on Mexican-American activist Cesar Chávez, John F. Kennedy, and, my very favorite, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Because there was no national holiday commemorating Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday, on that day my parents let us stay out of school in the morning and we drove a long forty-five minutes to go to downtown Miami’s Torch of Friendship, a memorial originally built to honor John F. Kennedy. There, standing in a circle beneath the torch that burned perpetually skyward, we sang “We Shall Overcome” and talked about why Dr. King and others like him had been so important. We also rededicated ourselves to another year of trying to make the world a better place. Then my parents held an open house so that people could come talk, hear the freedom songs, listen to the “I Have a Dream” speech, or watch documentaries on TV. I remember loving Dr. King as if he had been a fallen member of our family.
Yet it was not enough.
I don’t remember the incident, but my mother says I came home from school one day and said, “Martin Luther King was just a troublemaker. He caused a lot of problems.” Obviously, I had overheard one of my classmates saying that, the classmate having overheard it from a parent.
That was the last straw. Although my mother liked the academic program at the Horizon School, she decided the isolation was unacceptable for us. The summer between my fourth- and fifth-grade years in school—when we moved into yet another white neighborhood—I attended summer school for the first time at a public school, Colonial Drive Elementary. I noticed the difference right away, since there were several other black students at the school that summer. I felt like I was under a magnifying glass: The way I spoke, the way I dressed, the way I could read passages from books above my grade level—everything was noted by both classmates and teachers. I remember black students at my table staring at me while I put mustard on my chicken sandwich in the cafeteria. I felt like an oddity.
In my family’s new neighborhood, I felt worse—like a pariah.
In 1975, when I was nine, my family moved to a waterfront home in a peaceful suburb named Point Royal, at the southern end of Dade County. Everything was fresh and untried: a new room, a wonderful new backyard on the bank of a wide canal, my very own bedroom—with carpeting! We were the only black family there, in the beginning, but that had been true in our last neighborhood, and I’d made friends. I’d played football with white neighborhood boys, breaking my glasses more than once in my scramble to catch a pass or avoid a tackle. True, some nights white members of the Unitarian church our family attended sat in their cars to patrol our home because of threats against our family, but my parents never told us this. I would make friends again, I figured.
Walking down my new street not far from home, one day I encountered an older boy, a teenager, ambling in my direction. I did not look at him or speak to him, in the way younger children expect to be invisible to older children. “If there’s one thing I can’t stand,” the boy said as he passed, almost as if he were speaking to himself, “it’s a four-eyed nigger.”
He was looking at me, and his words stabbed me to my soul. I had heard the word “nigger” before, but it had never been leveled at me in that way, and the boy was so much older, he might as well have been a grown man. I felt exposed, stripped of all essence save my skin color. To me, “nigger” was a word used by lynch mobs and Ku Klux Klan members, a relic I’d never expected to break the peace of one of my first days strolling happily on my family’s new street. Recalling that encounter brings to mind a poem by Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen, “Incident,” about the devastating effect of the word “nigger” on a black child.
Once riding in old Baltimore,
Heart-filled, head-filled with glee,
I saw a Baltimorean
Keep looking straight at me.
Now I was eight and very small,
And he was no whit bigger,
And so I smiled, but he poked out
His tongue, and called me, “Nigger.”
I saw the whole of Baltimore
From May until December;
Of all the things that happened there
That’s all that I remember.
“Nigger!” a five-year-old boy teased another day, horrifying me not for myself, but for him. What kind of parents would teach such superiority and hate? “I wish niggers were still slaves!” another boy, this one my age, called at me once while I was walking our dog. I began to expect outbursts from every white child, and braced for them.
There was also vandalism. I tried not to be bothered too much when one night someone threw slimy tomatoes against the new white wall of our house. Or when, another time, someone slipped rocks into the gas tank of our station wagon. Still, I couldn’t help internalizing the notion of being unwelcome, that it was safer to play indoors with my sisters than to venture outside, that we were under attack.
My parents’ explanation made it a little better. “People who are prejudiced are just ignorant. They don’t know any better,” they said, which made me feel sorry for bigots, but it wasn’t long before I didn’t like my new neighborhood much at all. I learned to dread public encounters, to dread being noticed.
For years afterward, when I left the safety of my yard, I walked with my eyes cast down.
When the school year began, I was bused with the white students in my neighborhood to West Perrine, a black neighborhood, to attend R. R. Moton Elementary School. By now, desegregation had been achieved in many neighborhoods through busing, and the very young black children from West Perrine were bused to Bel-Aire Elementary School, where my sisters attended school, until the fifth grade. Fifth and sixth grades belonged to R. R. Moton.
The poverty surrounding R. R. Moton was stark and depressing to me. Through no fault of their own, the residents had very little, and that was clear in the appearance of some of their homes. The neighborhood looked a little foreign to me, but I loved the school, and my mother noticed the change in me right away. R. R. Moton had a black principal, a very caring and supportive woman named Maedon S. Bullard. R. R. Moton also had some black teachers—the first I’d ever seen—one of whom was my fifth-grade teacher, Janelle Harris. I delighted in seeing people who looked like me in positions of authority at my school. Suddenly, the same girl who had criticized Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as a troublemaker was writing poems like “The Struggle for Equality,” which I wrote when I was about eleven:
It started in Africa, in the days of old,
When liberty and freedom were better than gold.
Then great ships came across the sea,
Taking away in chains the ancestors of you and me.
For many, many years the tired slaves worked,
Until at Lincoln’s speech, their ears really perked.
Between the States anger arose.
Some said, “Lincoln’s a great man!”
Others, “I ought to punch him in the nose!”
Anger turned to hate, hatred turned into war,
Until many men lay dead upon the ground
And on the floor.
The bloody war went on—men died by the ton.
It went on for about four years,
Until supposedly freedom for Blacks was won.
“Slavery is dead,” the big signs read.
Yet, it still seemed harder for Blacks to get
Their daily bread.
The law said that they could vote, but many armed men
Kept them away from the polls.
How long could this bad treatment hold?
Then it came into realization—
They had to change that civilization.
“We must rise, let us waste no more time.
Discrimination is a terrible crime.
Down with the Ku Klux Klan! Up with the NAACP!
We’ll show them how really tough we can be!”
Marches, sit-ins, jail-ins—they did everything—
Like listen to the speeches of Malcolm X and M. L. King.
They had peaceful demonstrations, yet they still got arrested.
The courage of these people had really been tested.
We struggled then, and will still struggle now;
And we are going to keep on struggling until victory is won.
And, as said in the words of Frederick Douglass, “There is
No progress without struggle. This struggle may be a moral
One, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both moral
And physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes
Nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”
I had become politicized, feeling a stronger sense of identity and belonging. I began reciting my poem in oratorical contests sponsored by black organizations in Miami; at one, the Theodore R. Gibson Oratorical Contest, I won year after year. (Father Gibson was a former Miami NAACP president and a very influential minister, civil rights activist, and Miami City Commissioner. When Florida’s McCarthyism-inspired “Johns Committee” tried to subpoena his NAACP membership list in 1959, Father Gibson refused to comply and was arrested as a result).1 My sisters and I were also attending NAACP meetings and annual national conventions, and as I got older, I was able to absorb more of the meaning of the rhetoric of civil rights.
Yet at school my classmates mocked the way I spoke in clear, grammatical English, calling me “Oreo.” Even a teacher mocked my accent in the cafeteria one day. I was hurt, but the irony was not lost on me: Many of these same students probably had never heard of the NAACP, nor could they say what the initials stood for. They did not consider me “black enough,” yet I knew more about black history than they did, and I had more of a sense of being a link in a chain that stretched back to the days of slavery. I longed for close black friends at Moton, but I did not allow my classmates’ attitudes toward me to sour my feelings about blacks. To me, other black children simply remained a mystery: brash, sometimes intimidating, streetwise, always awakening a sense of longing in me. One thing that puzzled me about the black students at Moton was why they always seemed to be wearing the latest fashions—whereas my mother was dressing me and my sisters from department-store bargain racks, her cousin Joyce’s bags of hand-me-downs, and thrift stores like Goodwill. The black students also tended to wear flashy jewelry. My sisters and I looked neat, but we were far from fashionable, and we wore very little jewelry. Why could poorer families afford better clothes and gold chains?
Again, I received a cross-cultural lesson: Poor families, my mother said, often attach more significance to designer labels and fashion trends because of damaged self-esteem. Parents couldn’t afford higher education for their children or move their families into bigger or nicer houses, so they spent what money they did have on clothes and jewelry for their children. Middle-class blacks, too, tended to surround themselves with material goods—bigger cars, more expensive furniture, clothes, and jewelry—to make up for being treated as second-class citizens. That was the only visible measure of wealth in a neighborhood where people have so little, she told us. (And this is certainly something that has remained true in inner city neighborhoods today, where children lose their lives over Nikes and emulate rap stars who shower themselves in gold.)
My first “boyfriends” were two classmates from Mrs. Harris’s class at R. R. Moton. I really liked Cleo, the shy, soft-spoken boy who first asked me to “go with” him—which was a status in name only. He would be mine, and I would be his. When another classmate, Tommy, was absent for a few days because of a sudden illness—he recovered!—he heard I had asked about him. He wanted to go with me, too, and one day he came to my house and brought me a watch as a gift. My mother flipped when she saw it. I could not accept such a gift, she told me—and Tommy later confessed that he had stolen the watch from his sister. He thought he needed to give me an expensive gift to impress me, which was far from true. Cleo invited me to a school dance as his date, but at that time his parents couldn’t afford to buy him a suit, so Mrs. Harris gave him one. That didn’t matter to me, though, because I had always liked him as he was. I believe Tommy and Cleo came to blows over me once in the schoolyard. My favorite boy, though, was Darren, a sixth-grader who had a neatly combed Afro and played the trumpet in the school band like I did. (I’d inherited my mother’s trumpet from high school and college.)
One day, Darren asked me to “go with” him, and I was thrilled. Then he heard a rumor that I was already going with Cleo and Tommy, and he confronted me to ask if it was true. “Well, yes, kind of,” I said, squirming. It had never occurred to me that it was wrong to go with more than one person at a time, but I saw hurt and accusation in Darren’s pretty brown eyes that day. Something inside of me shriveled.
Yes, I liked Cleo and Tommy, but Darren was different. His grammar was very good, and he was serious about school and his music. As a sixth-grader, he was also much more mature than Cleo or Tommy. Mom had not liked Tommy at all after the watch-stealing revelation, but I thought Mom would like Darren. Even at the tender age of ten, I could sense that Darren was a boy I had things in common with, someone who could be a true friend. After he found out I already had two “boyfriends,” though, I don’t remember him ever speaking to me again. In the next bone-dry years of junior high school and high school, when not a single boy I liked would ask me to go with him, I would remember Darren as the one who got away, the one I’d done wrong. I would always wish we’d met when we were older, when both of us didn’t still have so much to learn about the perplexing, painful dance between boys and girls.
My sisters Johnita and Lydia and I never had boyfriends in junior high or high school. Although our schools were racially diverse—about one-third each black, white, and Hispanic—we tended to take honors and gifted classes, where there were hardly any other black students, and white boys, for the most part, weren’t interested in us romantically. My glasses had thick lenses, and I tried no hairstyle more ambitious than pigtails for much of my high school career. I felt woefully unattractive. When I complained about the lack of male attention, my mother explained that I intimidated some of the boys, since I was editor of the school newspaper and on the speech and debate team, and my name was often heard on the morning announcements. “Wait until you go to college. It’ll get better then,” my mother promised me. “You’ll meet boys you have more in common with.”
The wait seemed interminable. I had “arranged” dates to both my junior and senior proms. I went to the first with the son of Miami activist and minister Anna Price, a good friend of my mother’s, and to the other with the son of U.S. Rep. Alcee Hastings, a former federal judge who was later elected to Congress, and who had attended law school with my father. I met both boys for the first time on prom night. They were nice to me, especially considering the circumstances. (Hollis Price took me to a movie a couple of years later, when we were both in college, but we never stayed in touch.) I simply didn’t have enough boys to choose from, and despite the best intentions of my parents, both proms were terribly awkward for me. How could I have fun with a stranger?
Even worse, I went to my senior prom with a guilty conscience. I’d had an unexpected incident with a male friend of mine, a boy I’ll call J. who was in my newspaper class. J. and I spent a lot of time together, and he’d recently invited me to see a performance of the gospel musical Your Arms Too Short to Box with God, starring vocal powerhouse Patti LaBelle. I really thought of it as going to a musical with a friend, but when we walked inside, the first person I saw was a bearded man named Dr. William Perry, the president of the Miami branch of the NAACP. Dr. Perry’s grin began to emerge when he spotted me, but as soon as J. appeared beside me, his face hardened. When I introduced J., Dr. Perry was polite, but it was obvious to me that he didn’t like seeing me with a white boy. (One of J.’s parents was Cuban, but his skin was most certainly white). Oh, Dr. Perry thinks we’re on a date! I thought, horrified. I longed to explain that J. and I were just friends, but I never had the chance.
But we weren’t just friends in J.’s mind. Toward the end of the school year, while we were lingering in my front yard one afternoon after school, he asked me if I had a date to the senior prom. “No, not yet,” I said, thinking he was just making conversation.
“Will you go to the prom with me?” he asked suddenly, in a nervous rush. Maybe I was just naive—my mother has a very endearing naive streak, and I’ve often suspected it must have rubbed off on me—but I was honestly shocked that he was asking me. “I really like you, Tanana,” he said earnestly, clasping my hands. I must have stammered an Okay, because the next thing I knew, J. was stretching upward to kiss my lips. His hands were clammy. I tried not to show it, but I was almost repulsed, as if my own brother was suddenly kissing me on the mouth. I wasn’t attracted to J. I liked his mind and his sense of humor, which was much sharper than the average high school boy’s because he was so bright, but I’d never thought of him romantically.
Even if all other factors had been unchanged, I would have gone to the prom with J. if he had been black. The fact that he was shorter than I was wouldn’t have mattered. His acne problem wouldn’t have mattered. I would have gone simply as a friend if J. had been black, but I would not, could not, go to my senior prom with a white boy and subject myself to the stares of other blacks who had always thought I was an Oreo. I would have weathered anything for true love, but I wasn’t in love with J. It wouldn’t be worth alienating myself further from the people I had been longing for acceptance from since the days at R. R. Moton Elementary School.
I told my mother my problem. The next thing I knew, she’d called Judge Hastings and arranged a prom date for me. I lied to J., telling him it had all been set up beforehand without my knowledge, claiming I felt horrible about it. He told me I should stand up to my mother, that she was too domineering, but I only shrugged and sighed, feeling guilty about my lie. I just didn’t think he would understand the truth. How could he? Maybe he didn’t care what other people would think, but I did. I could just imagine what the football players and their black dates with manicured nails and sophisticated ways would say when they saw us: Girl, look at her. I can’t believe her nerve, showing up with that short li’l white boy. What’s wrong with that Oreo wannabe?
I let J. down, and I think somehow he knew I was lying all along. He had been a good friend to me at a time when I had virtually none other than my sisters; J. and I were both intellectuals and outcasts, and we had that in common. After that day, when I saw the same hurt in J.’s eyes I’d seen in Darren’s seven years earlier, J. never spoke to me again. I thought he was overreacting, but it made my stomach hurt.
My senior prom date was black, tall, and acne-free, but he was bored silly. We danced very little, and we rarely made eye contact. He didn’t know anyone at my high school, and he couldn’t wait to leave. The hard contact lenses I was wearing for the occasion were stinging like saltwater in my eyes. After we’d spent a token amount of time feeling uncomfortable, he said he was ready to go, and we left early. I missed the awards ceremony, so I wouldn’t find out until the next day of school that, although there were only a handful of students I could call friends at Miami Southridge High School, the senior class had voted me “Female Most Likely to Succeed.” I think if I’d been there to hear it on prom night, I would have broken down in tears of joy and disbelief right there on the stage. I had no idea my classmates believed that of me. Prom night, one of high school’s most disappointing memories, might have become one of my best.
Yet even today, after having dated men of different races and nationalities both here and abroad, I ask myself if I could have found a way to go with J. to that senior prom, and I still can’t imagine it. Race loomed too large between us. I know why I felt I couldn’t do it. I’m not even sure I wish I had.
But I’ve always been sorry for the lie. J. deserved to hear the truth. How would I have felt if our positions had been reversed, if he’d felt too embarrassed to take a black girl to his prom? I would have considered his position weak at best, racist at worst. I’d hoisted the weight of my racial insecurities and the history between the races onto J., and he’d only wanted to go to his senior prom with a girl he really liked.