m review — social commentary & satire — memories on race
Memories on Race
by Felicia Harris
My mother is black, not café au lait, not tan, not brown, but Black. A rich, deep, dark black like compost; pitch black, tar black. I love my mother's skin, crave it. When I was a child her skin reminded me of my favorite things, bittersweet chocolate and blackberry jam. As an adult I still feel the same desires I had as a little one, when things are bad, to be reabsorbed back into my mother and her blackness, to disappear. I remember looking up at her as a child thinking how like the night sky during the dark moon she was, sans stars, and I wanted to fall up into her darkness. I would often lick my mother's skin, wanting to fill my mouth with her sweetness, but her skin was not sweet; it was salty from the continual sweat tears her body wept, tears never allowed to escape from her eyes.
I am red-brown like Georgia clay or as my great-grandmother used to say - sassy brown cinnamon. High-yellow with freckles and bright red hair at birth, it took years for me to "grow into my true color" as the old folks say. My mother was most displeased when my darkening started to occur and moved swiftly to abort the demise of my "fine color" with liberal applications of bleaching cream in an effort to save me from her plight. As a result of her administrations I now have a psoriatic-type skin disorder. At the time I thought something was wrong with me; it would take years and my own experiences with racism to realize that my mother did not love her black skin as I did, that she was infected with a terminal case of internalized racism.
Racism, in all its forms, has the potential to be deadly. However that death isn't always overt, violent, or physical. Sometimes it's slow and insidious, leaving smeared traces of white hatred upon your psyche. A steady and gradual accumulation like wool absorbing moisture until the soul collapses under its weight.
The assigned reading of Clarice Lispector's The Smallest Woman in the World caused my mind to be flooded with childhood memories of racism. I hate the story now as I hated it upon first and all subsequent readings; only my reasons for hating it have evolved. I resent that a piece of literature written by a white person has the power to unearth long suppressed memories and leave me reeling with no comfort or justice to be had at the end. As a black woman in a racist society, and yes, absolutely we still live in a racist society, I am often made to feel, when certain whites can even bring themselves to acknowledge my existence, like the smallest woman in the world. I have had to stand helplessly aside as my mother, "full-grown, black silent" was termed "black as a monkey" (p. 353). I am quite familiar with the explorer of whom Clarice writes, my family has been "discovered" by a myriad of them, social workers and wealthy benefactors, adventurers who came into the jungles of my ghetto to help us poor, pitiful darkies.
With that "killing rage," of which bell hooks writes, I recall the arrogance of these white men and women. Boldly entering into our homes as if they owned it, talking at me, my mother, and siblings in condescending, paternalistic voices as they carelessly handled our possessions, looked into our refrigerator, into our closets, and questioned us about our "sad" lives. During the holidays the wealthy ones descended upon us wearing phony, nervous smiles and bearing holiday tidings of cheap, white, plastic dolls and checkerboards.
The men never took the offered seat, but stood stiffly just inside the door constantly checking their watches as they looked about. The women touched us with gloved hands, remarking at how clean, but "greasy" we were, referring to our shiny faces courtesy of the Vaseline my mother used because it was cheaper than lotion. This remark was always followed by a nervous giggle as they looked to my mother for confirmation, "they sure are greasy, aren't they?" None of these encounters were ever complete without the request for "a little song or dance" or some white woman asking my mother where I had come from, "how did you manage to make this light-skinned, freckled, red-headed thing!" Never girl or child, but always thing! I can still feel the crushing hold of my mother's hand upon mine as she nudged us to show the "nice people" that we appreciated their gifts. And I hated the women for asking and hated my mother's meekness.
Like my mother, I too suffer from internalized racism, but unlike her I rail against this infection. I love my brown skin despite its unpopularity and the messages I constantly receive. I love my mother's blackness, I try to love it enough for the both of us, and I try to make my love of her darkness a buffer from their white obscenity and degradation. I am loud and vocal in my love of blackness, lovingly reminding her that the blacker the berry the sweeter the juice. I rub shea butter into my mother's skin to make it glow. Curbing the desire to lick her still after all these years, instead I kiss her eyes, her face, and her hands and hold her against my brown skin in front of the mirror. Now that we look so much alike and there can be no doubt that I am all hers, I teasingly ask, how did you make this brown girl? And she smiles now, but the smile never quite reaches her eyes and I kiss her again and again, saying mamma I love you, I love you, I love you!
References
Lispector, C. (1994). The Smallest Woman in the World. In Hansen, R Shepard J.
(Eds.) You've Got to Read This (pp. 353 - 357). New York: Harper-Collins.
hooks, bell (1995). Killing Rage. New York: Henry Holt & Company.
Felicia Harris of Portland, Oregon
Felicia Harris is a Washington, DC native, transplanted to Oregon six years ago. She graduated from Marylhurst University with her Bachelor's in Human Studies June 2006 and begins graduate studies in Social Work at Portland State University in the fall. She can't think of a better graduation gift than being published in the 2006 issue of M Review.
