Learning to Be Brown

My first memory of being in a grocery store: I’m with Lala, we’re loading the sliding black belt with our food, and a little blond behind me, about my size, asks her mother loudly, “Mom, what is she?”

The little girl is pointing at me.

“Don’t point,” says the mother, lacking conviction. The girl asks it again, and neither her mother nor I know what the girl is talking about.

“She’s black,” the girl says, now pointing to the cashier ringing up our groceries. “And we’re white. So what is she?” Again, pointing to me.

Answering that question has been a big part of my life. At that moment, as a five-year-old child, I wanted to say, “I’m white too, you idiot,” as a means of feeling safe, feeling one of the rest of them, and also because it wasn’t totally a lie. Though my mother had arrived here from Ecuador without American language or mentality, my father was half-Sicilian, half-French, and that was good enough for me to feel acceptable.

Only it wasn’t enough for lots of people. My mother dated a string of white men in the early 80s, and the one she married (and whom fathered my two sisters) had a penchant for calling us dirty Spics when he was at his drunkest. (Incidentally, he also liked to call me a prima donna, and for many years I interpreted that as my being a forerunner of the Madonna, and could not for the life of me figure out how that was an insult.) Girls in school, too, were vaguely hostile, as if I might start doing a Mexican hat dance at any moment. I was brown, I was bookish, I was weird.

I don’t mean to overemphasize my struggle. Lots of friends look at me now and say, “I didn’t know you were Hispanic! It just looks like you have a tan!” And in late high school, early college, during the meteoric rises of J-Lo and Ricky Martin, brownness suddenly became hip. At one point I might have offered translation services I was so proud of my darker heritage.

But other moments I’ve been accused of being too white, not owning my roots enough. In graduate school, a blue-eyed blonde I later became friends with but, during the incident I’m about to recount, I was deathly frightened of, told me she was more Hispanic than I was. She’d grown up in a heavily Puerto Rican populated neighborhood. She knew more rituals, had more Hispanic friends, felt love from more Hispanic people than I ever had. We were both drunk at an English department party when she said this and I hoped she didn’t mean it, but still I was livid and hurt and I felt she was right.

(Side note: not that I’d have the balls to compare myself with the leader of the free world or anything, but I get truly pissed at people of all stripes and races and creeds who’ve decried Obama for not being black enough. And obversely, for not being white enough. Or more disturbingly, I’ve heard, “If he were a white man, he would never have (fill in this blank).” As if the man could have ever chosen who he is. Learning to navigate two worlds is difficult enough—to hear black and whites both say, “Hey, stay in my world!” must be as maddening for him as it is for me.)

I, unlike my blond Hispanic-esque friend, had grown up in a New Orleans neighborhood that didn’t exist to me. In Gentilly Woods it was me and Lala (inside, ironically, the only unbarred house on the street), and the outside world was filled with white people who were out to get us. When I started going to school with whites and longed to be confident and loud as they were, Lala balked. The gringo language was hideous, she’d say, with the exception of words like motherfucker, and she didn’t want it spoken in her house. When Americans spoke, they didn’t know what they were saying, she said. (I didn’t argue that just because she didn’t understand them, it didn’t mean they didn’t understand one another.) Her ban of English didn’t bother me. But when she would pick me up from school some days, she’d bring her brownness into the white world and embarrass me. Rather than going to the principal’s office to check me out, as per the rules, she’d march directly to my classroom and address the teacher, Mrs. White (no shit—her actual name), in Spanish. When someone doesn’t speak your language, it’s hard to argue with them. I was always let go immediately when Lala showed up, and my classmates thought she had some special power. We understood words they didn’t, and that made us doubly weird.

When my mother would come home from work, I was in the white world again. It wasn’t as if she loathed her first language or her heritage, but I sensed it was sort of uncool for her. She had gone to an elite Catholic all-girls school, had zero Hispanic friends, wore the frosted hair and pink lips of the 80s. Rosita was doing her utmost to be a material girl in a material world, and I wasn’t sure whether to follow her lead or Lala’s. Both of their lives seduced me, both were beautiful. But while I was a part of them, deep down I felt detached from each. Many years I spent avoiding making a decision about who I’d be. Which side was I on?

Here’s the real reason I’m writing this, and it’s a shift from the personal to the political: for me, learning to be brown is also a simultaneously struggle with learning to be white. Learning to be myself. And lately I’ve been dismayed at the passionately intense hatred I’ve felt toward white conservatives in recent months, and I’m looking for ways to cure myself of it, for what it is inside of me that boils these political waters.

Many people, including my very liberal husband, want to know why I’ve lately got a near zero-tolerance policy for conservatives. Here’s the simplest definition I can give: 1963. 1968. Jim Crow. The Voting Right’s Act. Lilly Ledbetter. Jack Johnson. Brown vs. Board. Social equality. Civil Right’s Act. David Duke. The 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. Selma, Alabama. Birmingham, Alabama. The 19th Amendment. Water hoses. George Wallace.

I feel that if one is not working for social equality and justice, then one is working against it. As a teacher of rhetoric, I usually abhor the either-or fallacy, but I think it applies here. For the most part, conservative Americans (obviously, especially those in power) are historically on the forefront of denying all people their rights rather than bestowing them freely as our Constitution promises it shall do. I’ve got staunchly libertarian friends who make everything an economic issue, and if you know me at all, you know I’ve got no claims to understanding our vast economy and want can be done to heal it. I see issues such as health care reform, civil rights reform, equal opportunities, in strictly humanitarian terms. Balancing the budget doesn’t interest me (though I’ll concede it must be done), but healing people and old hard wounds does. The work in healing our nation’s ills isn’t finished, and if you think it is, then…I won’t be cynical and say what I truly think, but I will pray for you. I know conservatives don’t speak my language, and I don’t speak theirs. I am working on it: speaking more softly than I once spoke, listening more closely. I’ll try to whisper the last lines of this blog.

I won’t make this into a political party thing, as I know that southern Democrats of the past and present have been particularly repugnant, but I do believe it is about a liberal versus conservative thing. I will agree with what Patrick Kennedy said as he was eulogizing his father: we must agree that Americans from both sides of the political spectrum love their country equally.

But I have a question to ask: when people at tea parties and town hall debates hold up signs glorifying our country’s past, saying they want America to be the same America they grew up in, with what perspective are they viewing the world? Through what lens do they see themselves? How did that America seem to other folks?

I grew up in this country and wanted to be nothing more than a real, proud, white American. Now I want to hug that little brown girl, hug the little white girl who didn’t know what to call her. I want them to love each other before they don’t know how anymore. Before it’s too late.

Prose poem...sort of

On his left eyelid Brock has 143 eyelashes. I’m thinking this is a whole lot and they’re long ones too, considering I pull out about ten of mine per day, while he’s telling me this is the last time he will ever drink this way. I pull the blanket to his chin and he’s close to shivers. One of 143 eyelashes is white— anomaly, or prescience? His beard is lovely red and I count those hairs too, but in the three-hundreds descending the valley of the chin I give up and guess, You’ve got 1,846 facial hairs. This really is the last time, he says. Give everyone love, tell them I meant no harm. Now, am I listening, I tell myself. And I see, on the blackboard of my mind: cirrhosis and psoriasis—both hard to spell and say. Now, I am scratching thin white patches from his head. He can’t hear his thoughts when I scratch his head, he says, but can he feel them. So I wonder: while I’m scratching his head, am I creating new Brock-thoughts? Brooke-fingernail, meet Brock-thought. Say everything is gonna be alright. Sing the three little birds song. Right now nothing will be buggy again. I try anyway: Is this the 143rd convalescence? Is this my 143th time scratching and counting and not listening with my concerned listening face? Are there 143 ways for me to love him? I’m still counting.

The Trouble with Being Buggy

I’ve had a heck of a time working on my “On Bugginess” essay lately and have finally decided the only way to figure it out is to take a step back and write about it while not writing about it, with none of the pressures of creating an all caps ESSAY, with Montaigne pointing a finger through the annals of history and, most likely, hell. In other words, I’ll blog to see why this is so hard for me to encapsulate.

Several years ago, months into our nascent relationship, Brock came up with the term “buggy” to describe how King would behave every time I visited their place. He would become ecstatic, nervous, he’d pace the room—he seemed to be on the verge of either vomiting or enveloping me in a two-pawed bear hug. Often he did both. This term, it has to be said, also converges with the new vocabulary I’d introduced to Brock’s life. I would bring him anywhere he wanted to go rather than take him. When I beckoned him to show him something super neat and needed him close by to inspect it, I’d say Come see. And when we went grocery shopping together, we’d use a buggy, not a daft old cart. These expressions were so endearing to him he could hardly take it (really—I was almost dumped for being too adorable), and this became part of our creation of each other.

Buggy eventually became what we’d call each other at our most loving moments, which then became our permanent reciprocal pet names. Couples do this, and it’s continually fascinating to me that it spans our genders and ethnicities and cultures—everyone who owns a language finds something unique and loving to call his lover. My former boyfriend called me Bay—the same name he called his ailing cat, and I called him Babe, which seemed to me alliterative and orthodox enough to be an acceptable counterpart. (People use all kinds of pet names, and I won’t even try to come up with more examples since they are infinite. If you are interested, though, check out Alain de Botton’s great book In Love which depicts the rise and fall of the protagonist’s first real relationship. The couple experiments with about two dozen pet names before finding the perfect one.) The Buggy between me and my husband certainly was not planned, but in dissecting the essence of the word, I must say I love the two syllables, the sing-songy quality of that. And also how it takes a traditionally negative vowel sound, the “uh” of the first syllable, and flips it on its ass in the second with the oh-so-positive “ee” sound. Though I didn’t pick buggy I couldn’t think of a better word.

(An incidental sidebar: my sister-in-law Jennifer is in love with a man who shares her brother’s name but not its spelling—he’s Broc. When the four of us are fortunate enough to spend time together, the bugginess inherent in each of us rubs off on the other, and the two of them become the rare couple who does not get on our nerves after forty-eight hours. Usually after a few hours together Jen will call her Broc “Buggy”, and while he’ll love it he’ll say, “No, that is theirs.” Then he’ll become her Babe again and the world will be as it should be.)

What I’m still not sure about is whether or not Brock created the bugginess in me or just enhanced it. Before meeting him I was generally a happy person, regardless of whether or not I was in a fruitless relationship (and more times than not, I was). But happiness, serenity is not bugginess. I like to think of bugginess as a fusion between optimism and elan. It’s an optimism that isn’t blind, but frenetic. It’s the realization that most things are fucked but you love unapologetically and remain positive anyway. Positive in a way you realize may piss some people off because, hey, that’s annoying, or hey, it’s so comfortable to be complacent. In a weird way, bugginess gets shit done, makes others love you or loathe you, without really doing anything tangible at all.

I’m positive, for instance, that bugginess has gotten me every job and every promotion I’ve sought. The cynic would say, No, it was your pretty face, dummy. But I reject that. Having known tons of pretty faces at two of the prettiest campuses in the SEC, I can guarantee that looks go sour after about a minute of sourpuss-dom. Or attitude. When I applied to be a waitress at T.J. Ribs in Baton Rouge, after years of being a professional teacher/writer and never having worked a service industry job ever, I had the manager perplexed at my existence in the seat across from him. You’re a teacher, he said. You’ve got a Master’s degree. Why are you here? I told him, “I want to be here—I want to be good at something new, I want to learn, I want to work as hard as possible and see an immediate reward!” The candor and exuberance won him over. Usually they only hired experienced servers at this restaurant—a minimum of two years—but I had bugginess on my side.

The main trouble with being buggy, with the exception of trying to articulate it, is that it creates in one the insistence on being eternally enchanting. Yes, this wears after a while. Let me show you an example from two jokes I made on our recent trip to Baltimore to visit Brock’s family, two jokes, by the way, I didn’t allow anyone to forget that I told:

Joke 1: Brock’s aunt, Kris, was describing her daughter Abigail’s pursuit of equanimity in every part of her life: that all family members get fed in equal portions at dinnertime, that all children share at school, that no one is ever left out of any endeavor. (It’s important here to know an important piece of context for this joke—Abigail’s last names is Marks.) My response to this was, “She’s a perfect Marxist!”

Joke 2: While drunk, most fittingly, a group of us began pontificating on the rise of alcoholism and prescription drug addiction in our generation. Diana, Brock’s mom, said the word “alcoholic” was literally not in the lexicon of her parents’ generation. “There were simply no alcoholics,” she said, “except for my parents and every single person they knew.” My response to this was, “Sure, there was absolutely zero alcoholism in the 1950s. Back then they just called it ‘nighttime.’”

One must realize that I know, I’m perfectly aware, that neither of these jokes are the epitome of wit or intellect. But, shit man—people laughed. Heartily. That’s the Achilles’ heel of any Buggy. I want more of it, all the time. I feel that in laughter everyone is achieving their best selves while simultaneously there is something highly egotistical and wrong about me trying to lay claim on their laughter. Bugginess cannot be spread at the barrel of the laughter-gun. Love me, please. Laugh at me, please. This is not the way bugginess works. But who said zen or bugginess was easy.

But of course there is no real trouble with being buggy, other than it’s a high standard to set for oneself in the day-to-day of captive tourists in Iran, and worldwide starvation and poverty, and partisan politics and racism and all the rest. And other than the need to articulate its importance has become another of my day-to-day obsessions. I’m just a person. I’ve got emails and phone calls and family. The spread of bugginess has to sometimes play second fiddle in an orchestra of pinging triangles.