Expressions

The young, black woman at the microphone is angry.

As she speaks, her voice cracks. Emotion, I guess. Unshed tears making her throat ache, maybe.

She's addressing the black man who has left her for a white woman. He has chosen this thin-lipped, blonde woman, she laments, a woman at whose feet he once served.

Her powerful poem says how she was the black woman who literally lay beneath this man on a slave ship, covered in his urine and feces. How her babies were ripped from her breast, how she nursed the master's children, how the white man raped her, how she had to watch while her children were sold, her husband castrated and lynched. She wonders how this man she has supported, going as far as to dig his grave after life chewed him up and spit him out, can abandon her strong, proud self for... for that, her tone implies.

The room is on fire for the poet who continues to question her man, the woman who sings for him, says she has been the queen to his king. The audience, primarily black men and women, are cheering, applauding, leaping from their seats to deliver praise.

I am in the corner, wincing.

Her words are powerful. Undeniably so. Her poem would likely win any competition she entered. The listener begins to believe this young girl was on a plantation, watching these terrible things happen, that she has evolved through history and is now an old soul in a young body, a woman who has never forgotten.

Indeed, we must never forget.

But.

Slavery is over.

(I'm not going to go into discussions about the slavery that still exists in human trafficking. I'm talking about slavery in the Civil War era.)

It has been over for a long time.

People fall in love with who they fall in love with, regardless of skin color, history, economic backgrounds, societal standing, gender, etc.

I cannot and WILL NOT lament a man who dates and/or marries outside his race because of what I just said and also because that man is my father.

My white father.

My black mother.

In my favorite photo of the three of us, before we moved to the States and my parents adopted Mack Daddy Smooth, is when I am only a few months old. Dad looks like Meathead from All in the Family. (Woot! Irony train!) Mom sports an Afro wig that takes up half the photo frame. I am the somewhat-tan-looking lump in the middle who just looks confused, probably because a flash just went off and blinded my young eyes.

My white father. A king of my own naming.

My black mother. Herself a queen.

They are equals.

They are a unit. They are breath together. They are love. They are 40 years of friendship and togetherness, 40 years of making a marriage work despite the rigors of life.

They are my parents.

My father, called devil by some, did not rape my mother.

I am not the product of hate, of discord, a dirty high yella secret who stands out between the slaves and the masters.

I thank every deity I can think of and more that slavery is over. That black people were finally able to rise up and begin to claim their power. That there was a shift, a change, that bonds were loosened. That blacks and whites could begin to heal all that had happened.

The problem, of course, is that there is still a deep wound, one that has become that much more apparent to me as post-Obama-election racism has reared its ghastly head.

I struggle with my biracial identity in a way I cannot entirely explain.

I don't feel stranded or trapped or lost, some victim of the woeful wail that asks, "But what about the CHILDREN??"

I'm different. I know this. It's okay. And it's good. I'm this... intersection of two races that is unique only to me. Trying to be something I'm not, as with anyone, doesn't work.

I go to poetry readings, like I did tonight, as part of my job for Vox. By chance, two of the venues I've chosen are frequented primarily by African-American crowds. I sit back and watch, almost as though I'm conducting an anthropological experiment.

The reactions to poems are different, partially because this is spoken word and movement and community and power are all encouraged.

I come from the "quiet poets," the folks who read their words on a page in front of a small crowd, mumble "Thank you" into a microphone, and then sit back down.

Now I'm in a world where there is screaming and jumping, snapping and clapping, an interactivity that is exciting and unnerving.

These voices are coaxed and cared for. When poets forget where they are in their memorized pieces, the crowd says, "It's okay" and "Take your time." There is feedback, response, the sense of family. These audience members, many of them poets and/or singers themselves, wrap their arms around each person who takes the stage and ushers them home.

I can only imagine this is as a result of living through incredible strife, of never forgetting, of telling the stories of ancestors to children, grandchildren, aunts, uncles, and cousins, making sure the bloodline never forgets what life was once like.

Because of slavery's legacy, because of the murder and rape and beatings, the tears, the pain, the horror I will only ever read about, I know it is important to never forget, to hold my brothers and sisters up when they feel weak.

In doing so, however, I can not and will not deny that a second race lives within me.

I have berated myself time and again for not being black enough.

Not once have I chastised myself for not being white enough. Not once.

I know it is because I am automatically labeled black woman. I've been asked for the "black woman's perspective" and started to look behind me to see who the speaker was actually addressing.

Oh.

Me?

Uh. Well...

I can give you a tan perspective.

I can give you a light-skinned answer.

I can tell you that when I'm with my mother, there is no question that we are related.

I can tell you that when I'm with my father, I've been treated as a separate person or looked at inquisitively, as though he found me somewhere and I've just been tagging along on his errands until he tires of me. Or, of course, since he's white and I'm still being oppressed, puts me to work.

While my black cousins were in church, learning gospel songs and sweating through hours-long services as I did when we visited one year during Easter, I was in Sunday School with the Episcopalians. One hour. Very quiet. Monotonous singing of hymns. No shouting, laughter, crying, applause, joyous singing. No reactions at all, even after a child was baptized and celebration expected (at least by me).

Different.

While my cousins ran around the south in the middle of a city, I was out west growing up in the desert. They've always known humidity. I understand dry heat as though it's the simplest math equation I've ever seen.

Maybe I identify more with some of my white heritage because I grew up around white people and rarely saw my black family. Maybe I was thoroughly confused when my family left the desert city that had been occupied primarily by whites and Hispanics and came to River City where I saw groups of black people and honestly thought, "They're everywhere!" (I was 11. Cut me a break.)

Maybe it's because my father is white. If he were black, maybe I would fit in at these poetry readings because the family might have gone the way of the patriarch and I might have grown up with more black culture. It's hard to say. My parents exposed me to both cultures growing up. I remember attending the opera as vividly as I remember Negro spirituals. So much for that theory.

I hear the young poet sing, her heart clearly breaking for what she likely sees as the dissolution of her long-suffering race.

I praise her work because it is very well done -- so much so that I wonder how she can possibly carry all this pain and yet appear to only be in her mid 20s -- but beyond light applause to show respect, I have to say that I just don't agree.

Yes, your ancestors struggled. My ancestors struggled. It's entirely possible that my white ancestors beat my black ancestors, that within my body I am both overseer and slave, casting out my right hand with a whip and cringing as I wait for pain to explode across my skin.

Write a poem about THAT, kid.

Because I am this constant flow of energy, this girl ever struggling for balance, a girl trying not to be too much of any one thing for fear of losing this precious blend I am in the middle, I'm glad there's been an evolution, that the poet and my mother are not of the same mindset. Who knows what my mother was taught, what stories she heard, what pain she knows of slave times? She is probably 40 years older than the young poet who wails for her man while he's off making mixed-race babies. Of anyone, my mother should be crying out for the injustice. She should be wearing the blinders that force her gaze forward at Black Men Only, Forever and Ever, Amen.

But she isn't.

She shook my father's hand when they met during Peace Corps training and the rest, as the saying goes, is history.