The Lightest Person in the Room

"I've got that same thing," I say and everybody laughs. Hobbit has just shown us how white his stomach is compared to how dark his arm is from working in the sun. I take another swig of my margarita and give them all a look.
"I think you're going to have to prove that statement," he responds. I graciously decline. "Come on, show us!" my other friend H. says, joining in the fray. "Alright," I say and lift my shirt a little. I drop my arm to the exposed skin and show the room. Everyone is staring and amazed. To almost the same magnitude, my arm is as dark against the pale skin of my stomach as Hobbit's.

It's bothered me at times how fair I am. My awareness of my skin colour started when I was in elementary school, a first grader away from home for the first time. I can assure you I never thought of skin colour until that year, when I tried to make friends with other students and was shunned along with the other mixed kid at school, Marvin S. His mother worked at the school. He knew he was mixed. I didn't. My mom was a tad bit darker than me, but she was fair and my dad was dark. I remember being chased home by kids yelling "white child!" with the same vitriol that the citizens of Salem might have used when they called someone a witch. I would look through pictures for some kind of clue. I had a picture of my dad holding me and compared to him, I looked white. But there I was, a little baby in his arms, so I stuck to my guns and demanded the kids leave me alone because I was just as black as them and I had two black parents at home to prove it.

Over time, I stopped trying to prove myself to others, although I still longed for smooth ebony skin instead of the honey coloured skin that God had given me. I met other people whose ideals and philosophies helped me become more comfortable in my cafe au lait skin.

The summer of my 19th year, I discovered that my biological father was not the daddy that I'd lived with all my life. It was such a shock and came at a very stressful time in my life and my mother's life. Struggling with the lie she'd told all these years, her newfound salvation prompted her to become right with all mankind in the sight of God. Dazed by the information, I walked into my brother's room - half brother suddenly - and woke him, told him the story and went back to sleep. If it were all a dream, he wouldn't know this information in the morning.

My baby sister cried when mom told her. Granted, she also learned that Santa Claus didn't exist in the same sitting, but the shock was separate and distinct for each new revelation and when she ran out of the room yelling that my mom had lied to her (her 9 year old brain rattling with the new facts), I couldn't help but feel sorry for her.

There was a sense of relief, though, to know that parts of me was something else. "Mixed" is a strange word. I am black. I claim black with pride. Where black people have come from is amazing. It isn't all set down in writing - from music to inventions, from architecture to zoology, we have had a hand in the creation of so many things. But as I learned to like me for me, I found that I was clinging to some things because I didn't want others to doubt my "blackness". It's a weird place to be and hard to explain, but I figure someone who does something they don't really want to do all in the name of "manhood" or "popularity" can sort of understand where I'm coming from. In a way, to others and eventually to myself, "mixed" became a form of freedom and acceptance. Freedom to dabble in other forms of expression and entertainment, freedom to move past the bonds that society likes to package around people of all persuasions, and the freedom to accept myself and my own singular idiosyncrasies. I can admit, at times, that I enjoy being weird and all the ways that happens with me.

After I proved the magnitude of colour difference between my arm and belly, Hobbit puts his arm up to mine. Though I am the only black person in the room, I am not the darkest person present.

I'm getting better and better with being okay with who I am and not fighting other people's stereotypes of me, good or bad. And slowly, I'm getting more used to being the lightest person in the room.