I love facebook. I love it for many reasons. It keeps me in contact with my family. Particularly the younger ones, who rarely call, but use their phones to photograph themselves…at every step of their lives and in every bathroom. I can follow old friends without the time consuming responsibility of actually maintaining all those connections. Facebook creates intellectual community beyond the borders of my current campus. I can be silly and serious within a matter of minutes. I love it tonight because I found a cousin. I have a lot of cousins. I have more than I know and I rarely long for those who, for reasons of distance mostly, have been lost to me. Tonight, I found a cousin who loves old photographs as much as I. She has brought me blood through this sometimes-lifeless medium.
She has scanned in copies of photos of my great grandparents, my grandmother as a woman and as a child, my great-great grandfather and all the people they loved who populated their lives and these photographs. My parents separated early in my life. Being the youngest at the time of that break meant that I spent less time with father’s family than my older siblings, but some of them were kept very alive in the memories of the kindness they showed my mother. The tone of her voice tells of her clear fondness for my great grandmother. My mother—a repository of her stories and the ones my father did not tell—told of the oft-discussed “lightness” of my great grandfather. My grandmother’s fairness was visible to my own eyes in contrast to the deep brown-ness of my mother and her family. I was most curious and grateful of my found cousin’s photo of my great grandparents because they and my grandmother have come back to me a lot since the election of Barack Obama and the birth of my son.
On seeing my son, people, without hesitation or awkwardness, ask me frequently, “Is he mixed?” My usual response is, “What?” Not to avoid the question but to bring on the shame and awkwardness they should have felt as those words rolled off their lips. I want to shame them not for asking a question that is clearly inappropriate or for using a term that is only appropriately applied to dogs. I want to shame them for not knowing the history of slavery that makes my son slightly darker than my grandmother and clearly darker than her father. His curls are looser than hers and mine but he has her fine texture. His eyes are a deeper brown than the lighter ones she had…at least in my memories of her. I look at my great grandfather and how he could be in a photo of that period of any family regardless of race. I think about the number of times people (mostly white) have reminded me that our first Black president is also "mixed." I think to myself if he had not put forth such a strong and controlled narrative would they know this or ask for him for the verification they offhandedly ask of me.
My family is a black American family and that comes with contours (of color) and textures (of hair) that span the spectrum of humans and history. The sexual violence enacted on black women during chattel slavery means that all their descendants are “mixed.” I want to shame these people for not knowing that any black person can have a child that looks like my son because our history is written in our genes even in if silenced in other forums. It is the ahistorical nature of the inquiry that disturbs me. Sometimes angers me.
Now, how to put an American history lesson and this picture of my great grandparents in one raised eyebrow with a shitty look on my face for the next person to ask that question….still thinking.
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