On Being a Black Person in America: The Beauty, the Brilliance . . . the Pain

I have always hated the phrase “The Black Experience.” It implies that there is some one experience, or set of them, that can define a people. Further, the word black is often misused by many people to mean Afro-Americans exclusively, when it actually refers to Africans and all people of African descent.

I am a chosen Afro-American; that is how I think of myself culturally. That is the black ethnic group I identify with most. My father was an Afro-American, who, like most black people in America, was of mixed racial-ethnic ancestry. The mix among American blacks is usually African, European and Native American. My mother’s family is West Indian--Jamaican and Guyanese. That side of my family has a little of everything, including an English pirate named Sam Lord. His castle in Barbados is now a Marriott Hotel. He’s my great-great-great-grandfather. But the folks on my mother’s side are mainly black and East Indian.

The black diaspora, or people of African descent in the West, are as varied as the people on the continent from which their ancestors come. They are as different as the Italians and French and Germans are from one another.

Perhaps that is the reason the Assn. for the Study of Afro-American Life and History, which sponsors Black History month each February, has ceased to call it that. February is now Afro-American History month. The focus is now the history of black Americans. I regret the change. I like the all-encompassing implications of the word black. I like the fact that each February we can reinforce for ourselves and share with the world the diversity and common currents of black international culture. For there is a common thread that runs among us. In some cases it may be the knowledge of a shared oppression, either as colonial subjects, descendants of the enslaved or the continued objects of racist attacks. But our lives have never been defined by oppression only. I have always been renewed by black people’s seemingly infinite capacity to confront the world as it is, laugh at it, ignore the obstacles, and go on to do battle. What other people in America have endured so much, lived to tell the tale and created so much beauty? The rest of the world must have seen this beauty, too. Why else would they want to sing like us, dance like us, walk like us--do everything but take the weight associated with actually being us. But being us, like being you, is full of brilliance, beauty and pain.

The portraits that follow do not speak for the race. My family and I are simply among its infinite variations.

Daddy wore boxer shorts when he worked; that’s all. He’d sit at a long table covered with neat piles of I.F. Stone’s Weekly, The New Republic, The Nation, and the handwritten pages of his book-in-progress, “The Tolono Station and Beyond.” A Mott’s applesauce jar filled with Teacher’s Scotch was a constant, and his own forerunner of today’s wine coolers was the ever-present chaser: Manischewitz Concord grape wine and ginger ale in a tall, green iced-tea glass.

As he sat there, his beer belly weighing down the waistband of his shorts, I’d watch. He seldom saw me. I hid at the far end of the long, dark corridor in our Manhattan apartment inspecting him through a telescope formed by my forefinger and thumb: bare feet in thonged sandals, long, hairy legs that rose toward the notorious shorts, breasts that could fill a B cup, and a long neck on which a balding head rested. Viewed in isolation, perhaps, I thought, I’d see him clearer, know him better.

Daddy was a philosopher, a Marxist historian, an exceptional teacher. When he received his doctorate from the University of Toronto, he was in his early 20s and America was in the third decade of the 20th Century. It was a particularly bad time to be black in America. Hitler’s influence was spreading. Theories of white racial supremacy were rampant and discussed, as if legitimate, in the halls of academe.

Daddy became a journalist. He worked for black papers in the Southwest for several years, then began teaching at various black colleges. He was the head of the philosophy department at Morgan State in Baltimore for a while and later taught part-time at City College in New York and New York University. He had a short stint with the government too; head of adult education for the state of New York during the Rockefeller Administration. But as I said, that was short. A security check revealed he had been a member of the socialist DuBois Club, named for the great Afro-American scholar W.E.B. DuBois.

Out of necessity and desire, Daddy decided he wanted to devote his time to teaching young people at a stage in their lives when he felt he could make a difference. He joined the faculty of a Jersey City high school and began teaching journalism, history and English. His students, I came to learn, loved him. His daughter found it hard to.

Since Daddy seemed to spend most of his waking hours at home at work on his book--a Marxist-Platonic examination of liberty in the United States from the time of Lincoln’s administration to John F. Kennedy’s--we had little to say to one another. But when we did talk, it was to speak of the “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey,” the Greek and Roman goddesses and gods, and when I was 12, the nature of truth: It changes, a classmate in the seventh grade insisted. It is constant, I argued, and went to my father for confirmation.

The Truth Was Always There

Peoples’ perceptions change, I explained to him. New information debunks the lies of the past, but the truth was always there. And I told my father what I had told my mostly white classmates in a Bronx junior high school at the height of the Civil Rights movement: Black people were always human beings worthy of the same rights other Americans enjoyed, but it took hundreds of years of a slave system which dehumanized the master as well as the slave, and a social revolution before most white Americans would accept that truth.

My father turned from his work table, took off his glasses with its broken right-temple piece and released a long and resonant, “Yessss.” And then he spoke to me of a rational cosmos and what Lincoln had to do with Plato.

When these conversations ended, we each went back to our separate corners. For days, maybe weeks, the routine would remain the same. Then, without warning, the long, dark corridor became a horrible place. My father turned violent, a towering figure brutalizing my mother in a narrow, shadowy space. His rage, I think, was fueled by his sense of insignificance. He felt himself to be an intellectual giant boxed in by mental midgets. He sought the cache of the dominant culture which barely knew of his existence. In his day, to be a Negro intellectual was to be an exotic curiosity at best. Alcohol was his escape and the trigger for his apparent fury.

When it ended, he slept for days, it seemed, spread out on the bed wearing only his boxer shorts. I watched him on these days, too, wondering who he was and why he was. And as I watched, he’d lift his head off the pillow then fall back muttering: “Truth and justice will prevail.”

Whenever Aunt May came to dinner, the question was always the same: “When are you going to baptize that heathen child?” Her formal West Indian accent was high-pitched. Her mannered tone was as much British as it was Jamaican and straight out of Dickens.

Aunt May was a devout Catholic. My mother was a disaffected one. My father was an avowed atheist. But Aunt May still held out hope for me. Why, I don’t know. I mean, I did horrible things, like whistling.

“Whaattttt!” she’d bellow with Victorian outrage. “A whistling woman and a crowing hen is an abomination to the Lord.” So I didn’t whistle when she was around, which, fortunately, wasn’t often.

Aunt May always seemed cold and aloof. But that was a matter of personality. Her major sin, and the reason she had alienated most of the family, was because she passed for white when she came to America. She told white folks she was Romanian--a Gypsy, I guess. She looked very Spanish actually: pale white skin, long, black hair and finely chiseled features. She passed, the story goes, because she was a seamstress and wanted to joined the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. But the union didn’t accept blacks when she came to the United States just before World War I. So she said she was Romanian.

Aunt May’s behavior went against family tradition. Lots of my mother’s relatives, who were African, East Indian and English, could pass for white, but it was a matter of honor with them not to. Frankly, I think some of them were hypocrites, they wanted to pass but couldn’t quite pull it off.

Aunt May, you see, was my grandmother’s half-sister. “That man that fathered Marie Pinchmant DeLeon was not my father,” my brown-skinned grandmother, Ruby Duncomb Lord, would declare.

Aunt May’s crimes, however, went beyond denunciation of race, as far as Ruby was concerned. “She did me out of my inheritance. Oh, if the tale was told,” my grandmother always said. Who knows? But for some reason, Aunt May and my mother were close. She liked my mother, helped her financially, supported her through personal crises. And when Aunt May, who was childless, became old, she turned to my mother. As my mother’s oldest child, I inherited responsibility for Aunt May.

I last saw her 10 Christmases ago. She was old. How old, nobody really knows. Grandma always said, “Your Aunt May was a grown, horseback woman before I was even born.” And she dyed her hair jet black well into her 80s. I figure she was about 98 when I visited her South Bronx apartment.

Priest Comes to Visit

She cursed the Puerto Ricans and went to early Mass every Sunday in that devastated neighborhood for years. When she couldn’t go out on her own anymore, the parish priest came to visit her. It became clear that she was probably telling him as well as her neighbors that she was white.

“You’re Mrs. DeLeon’s niece?” an incredulous neighbor asked when I knocked on Aunt May’s door. The black woman said she had seen black people visiting my aunt but she didn’t know any of them were related to her.

That was typical. When my cousin visited Aunt May in the hospital a few years earlier, Aunt May introduced her as a “friend.” She introduced my grandmother the same way about 50 years earlier when Ruby came to Aunt May’s wedding. The bridegroom was passing, too. The woman told me to knock again, my aunt was home but probably didn’t hear me.

It had been several years since I’d seen Aunt May. When she came to the door with the aid of a walker, I saw a white-haired woman, bent over from arthritis and nearly blind from cataracts. “Oh, darling, I’m so glad to see you,” she said sincerely.

We the ate the Christmas dinner I had brought while “The Sound of Music” played on TV and the snow turned to slush and blackened ice on the grim South Bronx streets below.

Tears Well Up

We talked very little after dinner, but I sat close to her and held her hand. When she began to sniffle and tears welled in her eyes, I thought it was because she was thankful for the company and the touch of another human being. She was incontinent.

“I want to die,” she cried. “Oh, God, please, just let me die.”

I took her to the bathroom and tried to bathe her. She went limp on me in the tub. I was 110 pounds and she was nearly twice my weight. I had to drag her from the bathroom to the bedroom. I dressed her, put her to bed and stayed the night.

She lasted almost another year. Weeks before the following Christmas she was rushed to the hospital, and when her family came this time, she did not turn us away.

Everybody loved Kay-Kay. She was our oldest and favorite cousin. But Kay-Kay loved me best.

I knew everything Kay-Kay knew, even though when I was 5, she was 14.

“ ‘Give us a song,’ the soldiers cried, the outer trenches guarding . . .”

“I know the rest, I’d say, interrupting her. “ I must go down to the sea again to the lonely sea and the sky . . . “

“No, cudaface, you linkatara head,” she said and bopped me on the head with her poetry book. I loved it when Kay-Kay called me names.

“That’s ‘Sea Fever.’

“I know,” I said. “ And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by .”

“Pretty good. You’re gonna be something when your body catches up with your brains. Who wrote it?”

“The poet laureate,” I answered.

“Which one?”

“Jayne Mansfield,” I told her.

“No, you simpleton. I knew I spoke too soon. John Masefield.”

I was always getting things that sounded alike mixed up. Kay-Kay, who drilled me on composers and their music, once played Handel’s “Messiah” on the phonograph and asked me to name it. “ ‘They Call the Wind Maria,’ ” I said. Well, they pronounce it Ma-ri-ah. Messiah. I also thought “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” was “Salmon Croquettes In Your Eyes.”

Kay-Kay lived with my parents, when they were together, even before I was born. Sometimes I lived with her and her mother and our grandmother and several other cousins. It depended on which sister was having a crisis at the time. But we all managed to take care of each other.

I liked it best when Kay-Kay lived with me, my mother and grandmother in our Brooklyn brownstone apartment. In the early evenings, we’d sit in the living room reading out loud to each other while my grandmother cooked and we waited for my mother to come home from the hospital where she worked as a nurse.

The house was full of polished mahogany. Even the magazine rack in the living room, a skeletal thing made of more open spaces than wood, had been polished bright. The scent of lemon oil rose from its surface, as it did from all in the house that was made of wood.

At Her Feet

While we waited for my mother, Kay-Kay would sit in the big wing chair in the parlor and read to me. I’d sit at her feet with my arms wrapped around her long, black spindly legs. We were both thin, but she had the most fragile bones I’d ever seen on a human being. Her neck was long and slender, her arms, too, and her fingers were so delicate they seemed in danger of breaking at the slightest touch. She was beautiful, as well: Dark, dark brown with large brown eyes, high cheekbones and long, thick hair. I always felt so ugly beside her.

On Friday nights when my mother worked the late shift at the hospital and grandmother was away for the weekend, we were on our own. It was tuna fish salad, barbecue potato chips, pickled cucumbers and grape Kool-Aid for dinner--and the “Marge and Kathryn Show.” We lived for Friday nights.

Their Own Soap Opera

Marge and Kathryn were the stars of our own soap opera. This was still the 1950s, and we had been raised on radio soaps by our grandmother. I think Kay-Kay was Marge and I was Kathryn.

“Marge, do you think Adam will ever love you again?”

“He must. Once he knows the truth, once he knows that I had to leave to save his life, I, I . . . Oh, Kathryn, oh, oh . . . “

Kay-Kay said I was a ham, even then.

By midnight Friday, the dinner had taken its toll. Kay-Kay and I were covered with hives. My mother came home from work and found us asleep in bed, glowing in the dark: We’d dotted pink calamine lotion all over our bodies.

When we left Brooklyn, Kay-Kay didn’t live with us anymore. But we visited each other all the time. As close as we were, there was so much we didn’t know about each other’s lives. It was 20 years before she knew the terror my alcoholic father caused. And it was much longer before I knew how tortured her childhood had been.

Growing Apart

When I went to college, she claimed I deserted her, and really meant it. And from that point on, we seemed to grow further apart. I was no longer the student and she the teacher. When I came home from college we shared an apartment for a while. She proved to be the biggest pain I ever had to endure. But if she had not been there when my father died, to help me sort out my contradictory feelings toward a man I thought I despised, life would have been much more difficult. As a matter of fact, no matter how great the physical distance, she has always been there to support me at crucial moments in my life.

She has married and divorced one man. She now shares an apartment with an Italian-American woman in New Jersey.

Kay-Kay is one of those women truly debilitated by premenstrual syndrome. She’s even been part of a research study designed to help PMS sufferers.

She’s doing better. She’s reduced the sulk in her voice when I explain why I don’t have time to call or visit her more often. And I think she’ll sulk even less when she finds out the book I’m working on will be dedicated to her. Undoubtedly, it was through her love of literature, and her desire to share all that she loved with me, that I first learned the beauty of the word.