It wasn’t just the dreadlocks. A lot of times in DC I can chock up the staring to the badly twisted dreadlocks that now frame (or often cover) my face. Nor was it the protruding belly. No, these were not the stares of being that fat guy at a pool party. No, this was the same stare I got as I entered the classroom for the first time in first grade. The look I got when I was four years old and a fellow toddler asked his mother why I was so dark.
Those expressions that adorned all the white faces when my parents and I entered the room was the familiar one of “what the hell are the black people doing here;” even though we were attending my father’s uncle and aunt’s 50th Anniversary. They had always been kind to us so we felt obliged to come, but we never really belonged, thus our prolonged absence from such events and lack of familiarity with the majority of the faces. My father’s family has never accepted the Black family. Since before I can remember they made it clear we are the proverbial black-sheep; pun intended.
I had been processing this incident for a couple of days now, having feelings of laughter and sadness about it. But then I saw the movie “Antwone Fisher” Denzel Washington’s directorial debut. It is about a Black Navy Seaman born to a woman in prison who abandons him, and a father who was shot two months before he is born. Basically he finds his family and subsequently his place in the world. The search quiets all the demons that he had to conquer after years of abuse, abandonment and neglect.
Late for a get-together I jump into the shower. I don’t know what it is about water pouring over my face. There is a mysterious and magical connection between H2O and my brain that immediately awakens my mind. I am convinced I have solved the world problems in the shower, but forgotten it all during the toweling off process.
It hit me instantaneously as the water pounded the back of my neck and dripped down my body.
I have never belonged. I never had a family. I was never black enough to be black and certainly never white enough to be white. From a young age I was constantly reminded I did not belong anywhere. During elementary school it came in the form of bruises kindly donated at the hands of fellow students with sticks and rocks. Contrary to the rhyme, they did hurt as much as the word that made up my nickname, “alien” (too young for them to know nigger I guess).
Even within my immediate family I never belonged. What does a kid do when they feel smarter than their parents. When they are more mature. When they have no one to admire except for grandparents that regardless of current vital signs, alive or dead, they have never truly met?
There are so many moments, a mother telling a 3 year old to learn to play by himself because she cannot entertain him. Long-rides to a summer home alone in the back. Alone in the shower, I feel more familial connection with the cats now trying to lick the dripping water from the bathroom sink then I do to the persons who conceived me.
I have only seen the world as if I am not a part of it. My life is not unlike watching “Antwone Fisher,” I have the same connection to the characters in my waking life as I do to the characters on screen. And all too often the same detached vantage point. Like my life was a sad TV docudrama and I was just a viewer unable to affect its characters.
Is it because I really don’t belong or because I have put up so many borders so that I never can? Where is the line between life trying to fit stereotypes that do not fit and a not-so-self-conscious attempt to defy all of stereotypes?
I pull the towel around my back, move my arms back and forth to dry my skin. The mirror unassumingly reflecting all my imperfections, I am allured by my light-brown skin. All the history, all the conflict, merely based on this pigmentation, this incarnation of G-d’s coloring. I am bound to my ancestry by the struggle to no longer deny my humanity based on those skin tonations.
Yet the family whose pigmentation most closely resembles mine, my mom’s family, only gave me a little perspective on my place in the world, and some foundation. But how can you belong to a group of people you see only once or twice a year? And I will never belong to my father’s side of the family who has always and will always see my skin and my chosen spirituality as so differentiating me from them that shared ancestry need not apply. I have been so scared to face what I have always known, that I have no home, no family.
Can I even write this down fast enough? One hand brushing my hopefully soon to be pearly whites another trying to take down all that my subconscious is processing, I am moved to tears. Am I being ridiculous? It seems so as they are cut off almost as soon as they started, before I could move my hand to take note.
Not belonging has made me so perceptive, I have spent a lifetime looking at people as the other. Observing, studying, sizing them up. Can I trust them? Can I allow them to get close? Or do I have to keep them away, manage them, control their impressions of me? I usually tend toward the latter. This world is geared toward making you feeling alone. It pushes us apart, dehumanizes us, separates us. I have always kept people at a distance as people have never given me anything but confidence that they are untrustworthy.
I have spent my teenage life running from groups, never fitting into sports teams I played on. Never committing to groups I joined, even fraternities I pledged my brotherhood to. A large part was a total hatred for one-dimensionalism. I have always liked to have a lot of definable characteristics instead of one define my life. There is so much in the life to enjoy. Yet this has always kept me from truly belonging to anything.
How do I balance refusing to be pushed into these unnatural definitions and belonging to some group, to something, to someone? I look black therefore I should be; but oh wait your father is white, then are you not “really black, you are half-white” that means you are … You are male therefore you are, smart therefore, athletic therefore, but wait you are fat so that means….
I am adrift without a true foundation. Even the most distinguishable characteristic that too often is used to define me gives me a weak footing. Let’s face it, I will never be black enough. I never wanted to fit in those boundaries. Why be just another black face? Why conform to those stupid expectations of “blackness.” And I am to dark to ever pull off being my father’s white son.
Society is always telling us where we belong and where we don’t. How does one fight against being a stereotype and while never belonging to a stereotype?
All those white faces focused on my mother and I as we entered. They weren’t my family, their stares eliminated any doubt that we did not belong. Just because we share similar DNA sequencing, a familial genetic coed, does that make us family? I can say “hey nau voonst” in the same PA Dutch accent as them, but I might as well be Chinese when I am saying it.
I must be the only only child who is scared to be alone. I hate to be alone physically, yet emotionally I am always alone.
As I walk into my room the first thing I go for is my TV changer. I turn on the TV so I am not alone. Somehow the TV brings that comfort. Like a parent that seems to have been absent from my childhood. I might be taller, larger stomach, certainly more hair, have my own place, and found love in so many areas of my life, but as the movie so rightly illustrated when Fisher asked, “Who will I am the same little boy, sitting in the corner of my bed crying over the new bruise, over the feeling of being alone, being isolated, being the first grade “alien.”
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