Between Identity and Resilience

[2 of 5] Say I'm Dead: A Family Memoir of Race, Secrets, and Love (2020) by E. Dolores Johnson Prologue, Chapters 5 - 7 - SLA at Beeber 24-25 English 3F

Author: E. Dolores Johnson

Johnson, E. Dolores. "Details," "A Train Ride," "Black Girl." Say I’m Dead: A Family Memoir of Race, Secrets, and Love, Lawrence Hill Books, Chicago, IL, 2020, pp. 45-89.

By the time us kids in the 'hood were bussed from a Sears Roebuck parking lot on the Jefferson Special to the white Bennett High School across town, I was black to the bone. We called that old repurposed city bus the Ghetto Express because it drove straight to a neighborhood of well-to-do white people in large brick homes and back to the 'hood with no stops allowed.

244During the ride, boys played the dozens, trying to outdo each other's outrageous insults about one another's mothers. We girls, the intended audience, cheered the most brash wisecracks and pooh-poohed those that fell flat, egging them on until one of them was out of comebacks.

245"Yo' mama's so short she poses for trophies."

246"Yeah, well yo' mama so fat she got her own zip code."

247At Bennett, a school with about six hundred in each grade, we ghetto kids started the day mixed in with white kids. During the brief homeroom period, we sat in wooden one-piece desks and chairs for attendance and announcements. When the class bell rang, I was separated from my friends to spend the day as one of few, or sometimes the only, black kids in honors classes.

248I held back in those classes at first, worried I didn't belong there, because these kids were white. White kids who had everything, knew everything, and whose entitlement said that was how it was supposed to be. White kids who chattered with each other and planned get-togethers as I sat silently by, invisible. White kids who had already read the books on the reading list.

249But when I was the only one to answer a question about Julius Caesar in Old English, I changed my mind. Riding home later on the Ghetto Express, I sat with one of the dozens players the school had put in shop classes making shoeshine or bread boxes.

250"What's happenin', Madame Butterfly?" he said. The kids nicknamed me that in elementary school, labeling me an egghead, a "proper" young lady, with an older brother who'd made it plain nobody was to mess with me.

251"I'm reading Shakespeare."

252He cracked up. "Naw you ain't. For real girl, what you up to?"

253Those honors classes created a personal push and pull about my "place" all through high school. While I couldn't have explained it back then, many of my Ghetto Express friends were being taught to live with the lower-class circumstances of our birth, while honors classes were opening new worlds to me. At fourteen, our futures were being determined by the tracks we were put in.

254On the Ghetto Express, I threw in with some hip girls planning to join the Bennett drill team and perform at football game halftime shows. An older black girl had convinced the white coach to add some soul to the routines, and it was our mission to make them sooo fly.

255At rehearsals I was lined up in a row of the school auditorium with the short girls, some white, some black, to learn the steps. Our black leader was up front showing how to rock a long step forward and sway back on the other foot with funky attitude. Her rolling hips amazed.

256The team began the move, but not together. We black girls got into the groove and strutted our stuff. Some of the white girls did it, but others were reluctant, trying to make the move fit the team's previous military marching style, as was school tradition. A head bop was added. The white girl next to me looked disapproving and didn't do it.

257After a few practices, the old military marching team was nowhere to be seen and the white girls had all quit. We added our sassiest steps in the aisle of the Ghetto Express, ignoring the driver shouting at us to sit down. Before long, we'd won our version of a civil rights coup. That white school had an all-black drill team, jammin' with homegirls' steps.

258I wondered if my white relatives, should I meet them, would be able to respect me for finding triumph in those halftime shows. I also wondered if the Lewises could relate to my mixed race. Lots of folks couldn't, as I learned back in high school.

259One Saturday I skipped the drill team performance to sit bunched together with the black kids in All-High Stadium at a Bennett game. We were separated from the white students by mutual choice. Sprawled out behind me was an elementary classmate, a boy so black complexioned he was nearly blue. While everyone stood for the national anthem he sat, loudly running his game on a white girl so blonde I had to study her face to see if she had eyelashes.

260I turned and touched my finger to my lips. "The national anthem is playing."

261"Shut the fuck up, you sorry half-breed," he said.

262Me?

263With a forced a smirk I turned around, and caught the astonished look on the face of a red-headed white boy from honors class. The black kids tittered and watched to see if we'd fight, as our neighborhood code called for. Truth was, Madame Butterfly had never fought anybody. I pretended the incident was meaningless, cheering and chatting until I could escape at halftime.

264But inside, I could hardly think straight. I shouldn't have called his behavior out, but why did he have to name me as less than our black crew? I'd thought the whole Ghetto Express crowd were my boon-coons. Like the grooves of a 45 RPM record my mind looped: Dolbelong Dolbelong? Dolbelong?

265Mama was seasoning chicken when I got home and told her what had happened. She cleared her throat then said, "Don't take that race bait, Dolores. Life's hard enough without worrying about what people say about your being mixed. Ignore it, like I do."

266That boy's two-by-four upside my head cracked my identity open. Everybody didn't accept me as the black I thought I was. The specter of that uncertain acceptance would stay with me always, leaving me to wonder which blacks might harbor similar resentment.

267In later years, I had another such incident, during an after-work drink with some black corporate colleagues. We took a table in the back where we could talk quietly, away from the noisy yuppies at the bar. There had been an incident where another black coworker shouted at the vice president that he was tired of working on a corporate plantation.

268One man said I didn't know how bad it really was because the white management accepted me more than darker coworkers. "Your skin's so light, and you speak so proper you sound white."

269"I'm as black as you, and you know it," I said, unaware in those days of my light-skinned privilege.

270"My high yellow sistah, so you say." He wanted me to agree The Man could relate to my similarity with the wives and daughters he had at home. He beat a rhythm on the tabletop and chanted:

271If you're light, you're all right.
If you're brown, stick around.
But if you're black, get back.

272Others accused me of thinking I was better than them because I was light. Black men told me how fine I was because I was "light, bright, and damned near white." Darker men flattered my looks, saying I'd make a good choice as a wife. Having a fair-skinned wife would give them some status, and importantly, make their children lighter.

273But I saw myself as black, no matter what they said. My father told us we were. "You kids have light skin and straight noses because your mother's blood is stronger than mine. But you're black, you're always going to be black, and the white man is never going to let you forget it."

274David was probably right. Meeting with my lost white relatives could backfire because of race. But I was still ready to risk that, because even if we couldn't relate to each other, that too was part of knowing whose blood ran in my veins.

DMU Timestamp: January 21, 2025 22:02

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