Mixed: My Life in Black and White (2 page)

Primary Colors

1992: The Crayola Company introduces sixteen-count Multicultural Crayons.

These crayons “give a child a realistic palette to color the people of the world.”

—
Crayola.com

In the late seventies, before I started grade school and my
parents were still semihappily married, life as a mixed kid seemed pretty simple. Until the outside world started pointing it out to me, I didn’t even know that having parents of different races was unusual. Once I started school, my mother took on the task of helping me prepare for possible outside racist forces. She phrased her lessons like she worked for the Biracial Marketing Department. “Being biracial is the best of both worlds! You’ve got two beautiful races in one package!” she’d tell me. According to my mother, a racial makeup like mine was a privilege bestowed only on a few special kids, like receiving a ten-speed bike or having a bedroom all to yourself. “As you get older, you’ll see the benefits of being from two worlds,” she said. In third grade, I discovered one of those benefits: getting out of the random head-lice checks by the school nurse.

I was a brand-new student in Sister Mary’s third-grade class; a six-year-old public-school transfer in a room full of eight-year-olds. The head nun at my new Catholic school, St. Irenaeus, had decided that since I was already reading multisyllabic words, I could skip right over second grade.

For the first few weeks of class, I was extremely quiet, just trying not to mess up until I got the hang of the whole Catholic school routine. So the morning Sister Mary shouted, “Lice check! Everyone against the wall in size order!” I promptly shot out of my seat. When Sister Mary saw me trying to figure out my place in the size-order line, she pursed her lips as if to stifle a laugh and shook her head. “Not you, Angela,” she called out, releasing her laugh.

Now, Sister Mary laughed only when one of her students did something unforgivably ridiculous, like forget how to spell
Irenaeus
or stammer over an apostle’s name. She’d always cover her mouth after she laughed, as if she knew she shouldn’t be so tickled by the dumbness of her students.

As I turned to sit back down, I noticed that my three black classmates, Eddie, Jackie, and Greg, had never even gotten up. How had they known to stay seated?
Does “everyone line up” mean
only 100-percent-white children?
My mother was right. Catholic school was more challenging than public school.

While the majority of the class filed out, Sister Mary told us four remaining children to get a head start on our art project: drawing self-portraits. When Sister gave me a blank piece of paper, she said, “All God’s children have their gifts. Black children are blessed. They don’t get head lice.”

I was too afraid to remind Sister Mary that my father was white; besides, she’d met him the first day of class. Although I wanted to question her choice in keeping me from having a scalp inspection, I’d learned during my brief time in her classroom that it was okay for Sister to question me, but I was never to ask
her
a question unless it had something to do with schoolwork or Jesus. Even then I had to be careful.

Two days earlier, Jimmy Callahan had gotten in trouble for questioning her about Jesus. Sister was standing over his head with red plastic art scissors, preparing to cut half his mullet off. Jimmy protectively clutched his long hair in his fists and screamed out, “This isn’t fair! Didn’t Jesus have long hair?”

“I’m married to Jesus!” Sister yelled, fingering the crucifix hanging from her neck. “Do you want me to tell him how bad you’re acting?” That freaked me out. I couldn’t concentrate the rest of the day. I didn’t understand how she could be married to a dead man and wanted to ask her more about the particulars of that marriage, like did she actually have his body in her house or just his ashes, like my friend Karen had of her grandfather? How did she feel about people eating the body of her husband on Sunday? I kept my mouth shut because I didn’t want her to yell at me or advise her husband to send me to Hell. I told my mother about the marriage and Sister Mary’s yelling and crucifix-grabbing, but she dismissed the behavior as “obviously menopausal.”

I crayoned accessories onto my self-portrait and decided to ask my mother if half-white kids could get head lice. If Sister Mary was wrong, this would be the second time my mother had corrected her. The first time, she’d corrected her covertly, acknowledging to me that I was right but refusing my plea to write a note telling Sister Mary so.

“Angela, I am not writing a note about chitlins to Sister Mary,” my mother said. “But you were right; she probably never ate them.”

I knew I was right. Sister Mary had sworn I was wrong, though. She embarrassed me in front of the entire class.

The chitlin incident happened during American history while we were going over the three pages in our book dedicated to slavery. We always read history lessons out loud, going up and down the aisles, with every student getting a paragraph. I always skipped ahead to see what paragraph we’d be on by the time we got to my desk.

To me, the only thing better than getting a nice long paragraph to read was having a surprise spelling bee. I might have been the youngest and got my ass beat regularly in kickball games, but I could outspell and outread everyone. My slavery paragraph was fat, full of commas and periods. I couldn’t wait to dazzle the room with my perfect enunciation.

When my turn came, I dove into the words, reading them with the zest and energy of a weathercaster. “The slaves made meals from the leftovers of their masters!” I said, making sure the tone of my voice reflected how horrific that was. “Some of the food slaves ate included pig’s feet, chitlins, and—”

“Angela Nissel, please repeat that last word again,” Sister Mary interrupted from the front of the classroom.

I looked down at the page, my eyes desperately scanning the word, trying to figure out if I’d skipped a letter or missed a vowel sound. Nope. I knew
chitterlings
was pronounced
chitlins
the same as
plough
looked like
rough
but was pronounced an entirely different way. My grandmother made chitlins once a month, and even though the bucket they came in sometimes said
chitterlings
everyone in the family said
chitlins.

“Chitlins,” I repeated loudly, thinking Sister Mary had misheard me.

Sister Mary laughed her quick laugh, then tightened her little lips into a frown and covered it with her palm. “It’s chit-ter-lings, Angela. Break it into syllables.”

I glanced up from my book and saw the whole class turned in their chairs, staring at me. I gripped my history book so tightly, the brown paper bag book cover had sweaty little fingerprints on it. I knew she didn’t really expect me to sound out the word like a little kid, did she?

“Chit!” Sister Mary yelled, then looked at me expectantly.

“Chit,” I repeated softly, eyes down, focusing on the smiling slaves in my book, wondering if they were happy because their masters didn’t allow them to read, so they didn’t have to go through humiliation like this.

“Ter!” Sister barked.

“Ter,” I replied, a little louder.

Every white eye in the classroom looked at me, ready to giggle if I took another pronunciation misstep. I was getting the same looks Joey Shalaci got when he took twenty minutes to stutter through a sentence. The black kids’ faces looked more serious; their eyes pleaded with me to hurry it along. Slavery was embarrassing. According to our American history book, it was black people’s only contribution to this country. Here I was stretching it into syllables.

“Lings!” Sister Mary shouted, like she was giving a dog a command.

I sang the end back to her and exhaled, glad to be done with the torture.

“Now, put it all together,” Sister Mary said.

“Chit-ter-lings,” I said, my face about as pink as the pig’s on the page. My mouth felt funny pronouncing
chitlins
like that. I knew Sister Mary was wrong. Unless she ate chitlins, how was she going to tell me how to pronounce them?

Before I could start to read the rest of my “what slaves ate” paragraph, Sister Mary interrupted again. “Does anyone know what chit-ter-lings are?”

Silence. Sister Mary looked around the room and frowned, like she suspected some people in the room were withholding information.

“Chit-ter-lings are pig intestines,” Sister Mary explained. The entire classroom groaned, and some of the boys made dry heaving sounds. Sister Mary ignored the outburst and moved her gaze to the three brownest faces in the room. “Eddie, Jackie, Greg, do any of you eat chit-ter-lings?” Sister asked with a raised eyebrow.

Jackie shook her head
no,
so fearfully you’d have thought Sister was offering her a chance to be an actual slave. Greg, who was usually quiet, yelled, “Yuck! No!” Eddie didn’t say anything; he simply dropped his head down on his desk as if he were dead.

“Eddie George, does your family eat chit-ter-lings?” Sister prodded.

If anyone in the class ate pig intestines, it had to be Eddie. He was known as the troublemaker. I don’t know what he did to piss Sister Mary off so much, but she seemed to enjoy singling him out. I always wondered if her treatment of him scarred him for life, until I saw on the news that he went on to win the Heisman trophy and play for the Tennessee Titans. I saw him in a restaurant once and wanted to go over and ask if he remembered Chitlins Day, but I was afraid he’d think I was a football groupie with a really bad pro-black come-on line.

“I don’t eat chit-ter-lings,” Eddie replied, making his pronunciation perfect to avoid Sister’s wrath.

Seemingly satisfied with his answer, Sister Mary looked at me. “Angela, do you or your mother eat chit-ter-lings?”

“No!” I lied. I was too young to understand the word
sellout
or know that if I got older and denied eating soul food to be accepted by white people, some people would revoke my black pass for life. In that moment, there was no way I was going to be the new six-year-old Methodist girl who ate pig guts. Sister Mary’s husband would have to forgive me.

Sister Mary accepted my answer. I went on to read the rest of the paragraph perfectly, and the Third Grade Chitlin Inquisition was over.

The head-lice check was the second time I was grouped with Eddie, Jackie, and Greg but, unlike eating chitlins, not having head lice could be seen as a positive. I thought, Maybe all this race stuff evens out. For every embarrassing
chitterlings
experience, the kids with one or two black parents got a reprieve from something else embarrassing, like lice checks.

Still, as boring as going on a group excursion to the school nurse was, I felt awkward being one of only four students left behind. I wanted to be with the majority for once in this new school. It was bad enough that almost everyone else in my class was preparing for First Communion, a class I had to sit out of. I wanted to know so badly what communion tasted like. Was it a cookie or was it more like a wafer? I hoped it was a cookie, since my mother rarely let me eat high-sugar foods.

I drew one more pair of earrings on my self-portrait and started drawing in the background of my two-dimensional head. I drew my ideal bedroom, complete with two Menudo posters, even though I’d never listened to any of their songs. The popular girls at St. Ireneaus loved Menudo, so I figured maybe when they came back from the lice checks, they’d see my Menudo posters and let me walk home with them.

One by one my classmates started returning. As soon as a student showed Sister Mary his clean bill of head health, she had him start on his self-portrait. The returning and drawing flow was interrupted only when Joey Shalaci came back with his head down, holding up a bright pink note for Sister Mary. Sister Mary backed away from him and pulled a trash bag from the broom closet. She passed it down the aisle until it reached Joey, who stuffed all his belongings into it and exited. Everyone stopped drawing, and whispers buzzed around the room about Joey’s failed head inspection.

“I guess since everyone is so talkative, everyone is done with their self-portraits,” Sister Mary said, without looking up from her desk.

Always the
A
student, I raised my hand so I wouldn’t be grouped with the talkers. “I’m done, Sister,” I called out.

Sister Mary looked up at me in disbelief, like I was inconveniencing her by finishing so quickly. She propped both of her chubby hands up on her desk to help lift her sturdy frame from her chair, grabbed her beat-up cigar box of crayons, and slowly walked down my row.

She loomed silently over my desk for a second. I tensed up, wondering what mistake I had made this time. Would she make fun of my Menudo posters? Should I have drawn a crucifix instead?

“Angela, you should color in your face,” Sister Mary said, rummaging through her cigar box, looking at various tan-hued crayons, and then squinting as she pressed them against my cheek.

First Joey had head cooties and now I had to color in my face? Way too much commotion in the classroom for one day. Giggles erupted from every desk. Well, almost every desk. The black kids stayed silent, of course. If she wanted light old me to color in my face, she might just suggest that we all just take turns using our Ash Wednesday leftovers to color in their faces.

Finally, Sister Mary found a crayon she thought best suited my complexion. “Here, Burnt Umber looks to be about right. Color your face in, and then you’ll be done.” Sister Mary held out a crayon that looked like it had never been used. Hot Magenta was worn down to a nub the size of a peanut, but in all the years this box existed, no one had even colored a shirt Burnt Umber.

I took the crayon, wishing it were a magic wand that could turn me into an ostrich so I could stick my whole head into sand until the school day was over. I’d remove my head only when I got home to ask my mother why I wasn’t gray like an ostrich, because don’t black and white combine to make gray? They certainly do not make burnt umber.