The new black
I was at a party recently and the father said of his son who was playing in the sprinkler, “I haven’t told him he is black yet.” It was sort of a jokey way of saying that he hadn’t spoken about race with his son and before he could, his son’s classmate had written a poem about him, about he liked his son’s skin color, which made his son notice he had skin color.
Friday, I was reading a AAA magazine and there was a letter about a wonderful vacation experience a couple had in the Bahamas with a couple who owned a hotel: the man was white and the woman black. It bugged me these people were described in color and I wondered if simply saying one was from the U.S. and one from the Bahamas might be enough for the story. Meanwhile on Saturday, I was sitting in the salon on Iberville in the Quarter mesmerized by the hairstyles being coiffed when a Chris Rock episode was playing on BET and the wife had just found out about a prior marriage and kept drilling her husband if the other wife was white. Was she white? Was she white? But was she white?
Tatjana just read Dan Baum’s Nine Lives and I for one am sidestepping any more Katrina and Federal Flood stories for a while because they depress me. My neighbor and I were talking yesterday about the Federal Flood stories and she said she read only One Dead in the Attic and decided she needed ten years before she could read the next one. I said I’m like that with Holocaust stories. She said the best matzo ball soup she ever had was at the Holocaust museum in DC. I haven’t been, I told her, much like Katrina stories, Holocaust stories depress me. She said it is a funny thing that the most well kept secret in this land is Slavery and that most people don’t want to talk about it. I told her it was a subject that I was reading up on because I wanted to be able to talk to Tin about it. She told me her mother would be a good person to talk to Tin about it because she was able to explain to her all of the details in a comprehensive way.
But when? – how to introduce that into an otherwise happy childhood with topics such as marching bands and pasta pesto. My neighbor said I had a few years because it wasn’t until she was four years old that she learned she was black and it came from a school mate. She said the world will tell him he is black.