I don't ever think about being white. Maybe that's the difference. I think about wrinkles or spots, about hair gone silver or lips gone thin and pinched, but never about being white. It's just not a thing. It doesn't affect what I do. Ever. It's just there. Nothing to be changed or even noted. A 70-year-old fact.
My husband said he had at least one black and several American Indian forebears somewhere in his genealogic tree a number of generations ago, but our son emerged blond and blue-eyed. No wide nostrils or high cheekbones. I never even thought of it, didn't consider for a second he could turn out otherwise.
But skin color, as it turns out, matters. Not because it changes a person's basic composition or worth, but maybe because it's so, well, so there.
I've thought a lot about how I look over the years. Green eyes, chestnut brown hair, smooth skin in fortunate times, bumps and blemishes in others. Long legs. Small breasts. Fingers that span eight piano keys and feet misshapen by bunions. But nothing so elemental as skin color. I didn't think of that. I don't think of wearing something that I can't change or hide, that covered me head to toe. Nothing that labeled or disgusted or frightened.
And here's the irony. As much as I tried to make myself beautiful from time to time, the most beautiful woman I ever saw had something I could never have. The most beautiful woman I ever saw was black. Not politely coffee or nut brown, but black. Senegal black. Slave black.
I saw her only once, and stripped to the waist in a church bathroom in a homeless shelter on a morning when I'd been frying pounds of bacon in the kitchen, but paused to call everyone to breakfast.
I gasped to see her. She was astoundingly female. Round and generous everywhere that spoke of women--shoulder, hip, breast. Her skin gleamed, flawless and shining. She paused to look up, washcloth in mid-stroke over the back of her neck, but her head never turned. I saw her eyes in the mirror then, more slate than brown and just as flat and hard. She had no idea.
What I wouldn't have given for that beauty, that voluptuous depth. I would have traded my fashionable thinness, my obvious collarbone, my silly pink nipples for her charcoal and mahogany in a second. She looked like a woman. Next to her, I looked like a washed-out wannabe. I carried her image with me for awhile but later, shrugged off my envy and went back to my life, failing to notice again my white, almost completely ignorant of her black.
The closest I ever came to any kind of understanding was in Italy, where the locals knew me as Eastern European by a look, where I was identified and catalogued by a glance. There, the way I looked determined how I would be treated--like a tourist--and how I was expected to act: to speak English, to ask simple, polite questions, to tip well. My foreigness was with me wherever I went.
Maybe blackness is sort of like that kind of foreigness. Are we all basically the same? Sure we are. But for some, for those who can be categorized by a glance before anyone knows anything about their dreams or character, we automatically create distance. In that gap, wariness can become mistrust and mistrust breed marginalization. It changes the world. It changes us.
Even though I still don't think about being white, I do think about that beautiful black woman in the church bathroom. I still wish for her color and voluptuousness. I want to tell her how she looked to me, but can't think of how it could be done without sounding condescending. I don't like a world that won't let me do that.
Image: copyright Saatchi Art
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