The Best American Essays 2013 (13 page)

The sun had fallen below the ridgelines by the time we left the Nazi’s castle. My father drove us home. He wondered aloud what would happen to the Nazi’s stuff when the man met his demise, wondered if the Nazi had insured all those relics, and where his last will and testament—supposing he’d drawn one up—stipulated they would go. My father seemed concerned about the Nazi and his legacy, partly because he admired the lengths that the Nazi had gone to in order to amass such a collection, and partly because he seemed to think of the man as a friend. “A friend?” I said. I was incredulous. I said no way could he be friends with a man he merely humored, that true friends weren’t afraid to say what they thought, which was that the Nazi was (at best) misguided and (at worst) a lunatic; that he had constructed, unbeknown to all the people living in trailers and cabins along this road, a private shrine to the Third Reich; that he apparently thought Heinrich Himmler was a character worthy of admiration; that he obviously thought the Holocaust hadn’t existed—at least not in the way most understood it; and that unless my father had come out and said what he truly believed, he was silently endorsing the Nazi’s viewpoints. I can’t remember how or even if my father defended himself against these accusations, but I know he didn’t say what I’m thinking now—that I was in no position to talk. I’d said very little—if anything—during our visit. Though my mind had been lurching most of the time, seeking any sort of anti-Nazi argument, I’d feared that nothing I could drum up would be able to contend with the Nazi’s own encyclopedic knowledge. I’d even begun to wonder how I’d come to know what I thought I knew, and how it was that I could prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Nazis were guilty of the crimes of which they’d been accused. In short, I had done nothing and said nothing to give the Nazi one single reason to think I wasn’t on his side. For all he knew, I might’ve been a man on a pilgrimage, coming to pay homage to the ephemera of a lost and once glorious empire. After all, he had pointed to my name in a directory listing the names of former Nazis—and I hadn’t protested. I had thought,
Wow, that’s messed up;
but I had said not a word.

WILLIAM MELVIN KELLEY

FROM
Harper’s Magazine

O
NE DAY DEEP IN SUMMER
in a time when automobiles went away and stayed all day my friends and I sat on the curb and compared skin color. Jackie, a rare kid of German ancestry on the block, had turned red. Guys whose parents came from the boot of Italy had turned tan. But Salvatore, a son of Sicilians, who grew up to become one of New York’s Bravest, had turned, as Jackie put it, brown, like Billy. I still remember Sal’s embarrassment. Under his brown skin, he blushed. This troubled me. Why should the comparison of his brown skin to my brown skin make him blush?

So did I first meet the concept of race. Before that day, I can’t remember anything about it, though my eyes told me that people came in different shades.

I have had to rethink race since the arrival of my grandson, a half Albanian. According to the one-drop rule, his three-sixteenths African blood makes him 100 percent Negro; in today’s parlance, a light-skinned black, an obvious absurdity.

So how should we list him in the census? Who divided humanity this way? Nobody comes into the world knowing anything about race. We all have to learn about it. So I’ve begun to remember how I started becoming Negro.

Contrary to conventional misunderstanding, in my time growing up in New York, Negroes did not talk much about race. Striving Negroes wanted to transcend it. We did not tell our children they would not succeed because of their skin color. We waited until race clobbered hopes, then we’d try to explain the situation: Most Euros did not like us, so we had to overcome by working harder. We had to work twice as hard to get half as far. Accept that fact and don’t complain. No one ever explained the economic system of slavery, though we knew about our slave ancestors.

Of course, we also had alternative views. In the 1910s and ’20s Marcus Garvey had enlightened us to our position as oppressed people under a worldwide tyranny, and in the 1930s and ’40s Elijah Muhammad had begun to see the world through militant Islamic eyes. These views skirted the subversive. My father kept his Garvey and J. A. Rogers high up in his bookcase with his Frank Harris,
My Life and Loves
. He made Dunbar, Hughes, McKay, and Cullen more accessible, on lower shelves.

I grew up in the Northeast Bronx with the children of Italian immigrants, who mostly embraced me. Several things aided me in my acceptance. My Roman Catholic Creole grandmother and mother attended the same churches as my neighbors, St. Mary’s and Our Lady of Grace. Besides, I knew and could sing all of Frank Sinatra’s songs in a clear boy-soprano voice. Summer evenings I held small groups of boys spellbound.
Put your dreams away for another day and I will take their place in your heart
.

My Italo friends much preferred me to most Irish kids. (At that time not everybody considered Italians to be whites.) One day one of a group of Irish kids passing through our block called me a nigger. My Creole mother had armed me against this, without going into it very deeply: anybody who called me a nigger had simultaneously demonstrated his ignorance and his inferiority. I should dismiss the comment as I would dismiss the utterance of a parrot.

So when the Irish kid called me a nigger, I assumed an attitude of superiority and condescension. This did not satisfy my Italo friends. The Irish kid, whom they’d caught while his companions ran away, had insulted me, and they would back me up while I gave the offender a beating. But I demurred, had already lost interest. Why strangle a parrot? But Bobby, Jimmy, Sal, Jerome, and Joey would not have it. They gave the kid a beating and ran him from the block.

I had encountered the word
nigger
before this incident, but coming out of the mouths of Africamericans (united, not hyphenated). One of my father’s poker comrades, Mr. Timothy, used it all the time—this nigger this and that nigger that—and my mother and grandmother considered him coarse and rude. My father wanted to leave niggerdom behind in segregated Tennessee, and my gentle mother, who read
Vogue
and the
Ladies’ Home Journal
, considered it a curse word. Nobody with any class or breeding would ever use it.

In 1944 I started attending Fieldston, a Euro and predominately Jewish progressive private school. Having repeated first grade, I was older and bigger than my twenty Euro classmates, and my boy-soprano voice made me a star. Over the next twelve years I went wherever my class went, to the Met and MoMA, to Carnegie Hall, to see Scribner make pulp paper for special editions, to the bar mitzvah of a classmate at Temple Emanu-El. I went through the front entrance when I went to visit my friends on Fifth or Park Avenue. Their parents had warned the Irish doormen not to turn me away.

At Fieldston Lower, much of the kitchen staff had brown skin. Lila and Bessie, both cooks, treated me especially well. We youngsters had to help with the serving, taking turns going into the kitchen to get a dish of peas or mashed potatoes for the table, where the teacher would spoon it out. Whenever my turn came, Bessie and Lila made a fuss over me. “Here’s our Billy.” They gave me extra cake and cookies. Gently and joyfully they let me know that my attending Fieldston made them proud. I represented them.

My mother and my grandmother told me our family history from the unorthodox point of view of Creoles of color.
Creole
comes from the Spanish
criollo
, meaning a native of a country, and denoted persons born in the Americas as distinct from their ancestors in Africa or Europe, but later came also to mean persons of mixed blood, often those who were not visibly so. The African might lurk three or four generations back, forgettable behind Berlioz and good brandy.

According to my mother, Narcissa Agatha Garcia Kelley, and my grandmother Jessie Marin Garcia, before 1900 America acknowledged not three but four races. The word
race
comes to English from medieval Italian
razzo
, meaning any given breed of horse. Dogs, cattle, and horses had different breeds, the first Portuguese slavers must have mused in 1444, so why should not humans too have a
raça
? One breed originated in Europe; another came from Africa; a third, the Indians, inhabited America; and the fourth breed, also from America, developed as a mixture of the first three.

In 1613 the Dutch left ashore on the island of Mannahatta a free man of color named Jan Rodrigues, who established trade with the Indians. A man alone, he pretty quickly got himself an Indian wife. Many others must have followed, because in 1638 the Dutch government outlawed sex with Indians.

A four-breed America made sense to my young eyes. (On the radio, the Lone Ranger would put on the berry stain to pass as a half-breed.) Still, I could already discern differences between the swarthy Sicilian Sal and the sunburned German Jackie. Within my own family, though we all answered to the designation Negro (except when we didn’t), we came in different shades, ranging from Nana Jessie’s white-chocolate color to milk-chocolate-colored me. And my father’s friend, the foulmouthed Mr. Timothy, had that disease that made him look like a calico cat.

Yet the world outside our house, excluding American Indians and Asians (another breed), had clearly divided itself into colored and noncolored, to borrow from J. O. Killens. (We had not become black people yet, though some already liked Afro-American.) Any challenge to the two-breed equation met with incomprehension and disbelief. For instance, when Nana Jessie and I went out, people would sometimes come up to her and ask her in Italian or Spanish perché porque she had a piccolo pequeño nero negro ragazzo niño with her. Nana Jessie would answer that she spoke only English, though her dead husband had come from Ponce, Puerto Rico, and she would claim me as her grandson. The Puerto Rican kind of explained my brownness, and the interrogator would drift away.

Neither did my Italo friends accept that Nana Jessie’s grandfather Colonel F. S. Bartow of Savannah, Georgia, had fought and died for the Confederacy in the Civil War.

“Was he a Negro?”

“No, he was white.”

“If he was white,” they’d ask, “how could he be related to you?”

“He was white. And very brave. General Beauregard described him as gallant and impetuous.”

Bartow died in July 1861 rallying his troops at Manassas, waving a banner, shot through the heart. The Confederates won the battle. So he became a martyr and a hero. Georgia named a county after him. Nana Jessie’s mother, Josephine (age thirteen), had heard him, her father, make a speech before going off to war, promising to il-lust-rate Georgia and keep the niggers down.

Such revelations usually had a chilling effect on pink folks, Italo or otherwise. It slowly dawned on me that people did not want to confront that all this sex, much of it forced, some of it not, had taken place. No wonder my father kept his J. A. Rogers—whose research had unearthed several American presidents with either African or Native blood, and lots of evidence showing how freely the breeds had mixed in America—up on the top shelf with Marcus Garvey and Frank Harris.

Or take Sally Hemings and the confused hypocrite Thomas Jefferson. Everybody makes a big deal out of her breed (Creole in the contemporary context) and her youth (about fourteen when they got started in Paris), but they ignore that mistress Sally and Jefferson’s wife had the same father. Jefferson hooked up with his dead wife’s half sister.

In sixth grade, in 1950, I started to feel special affection for a girl in my class I’ll call Dolly-Jan Issanoff. She had a sweet personality and a shapely blossoming body. We would walk through the halls of school holding hands, until the principal issued an edict forbidding public displays of affection. At the time I did not take this edict personally, but in retrospect I see it as the first in a series of messages designed to enforce an important lesson of Negrohood: don’t mess with Miss Cholly.

Later that year I found myself uninvited from our grade’s first couples party, an obvious snub. Everybody knew that Dolly-Jan and I were together. Once again came the lesson: don’t mess with Miss Cholly.

Through newspapers and dinner conversation I learned about segregation, that if you wore a brown skin you couldn’t get served at certain places in New York. Josephine Baker was snubbed at the Stork Club. I wondered whether they had real storks there. And my parents couldn’t tell me about Josephine Baker without telling me about her naughty naked banana dance.

Early on, blessed with an ear for the variations of spoken English, I realized that I lived in four linguistic worlds. In my house we spoke standard, grammatically correct American English, all our
be
’s and
have
’s in the right place. Outside my house on Carpenter Avenue in the Northeast Bronx, where I spent my time when I returned from Fieldston in the West Bronx, the guys spoke working-class New York English tinged with many Italianisms. Like they would say “close delight.” At school we spoke standard American English with an emphasis on long French-rooted words and slight Yiddish intonations. On weekends when my father took me to Harlem I found a broad spectrum of speech generally tied to skin color, though dark-skinned men like Paul Robeson and Roland Hayes might speak in an international English, British consonants and American vowels. Ethel Waters rolled her
r
’s. My dentist, Dr. Bessie Delany, spoke standard with a southern accent. Sometimes poorly educated light-skinned folks would speak Africamerican vernacular (Ebonics) as well as did dark brown people. I couldn’t speak it then, but I loved listening to it and recognized its expressiveness.

The Negroes who spoke this Africamerican Creole seemed to catch hell. Nobody in my immediate family spoke it, so we didn’t catch hell, we just had no money. Only my aunt Iris, a native of British Guiana, didn’t sound American. Nana Jessie and her sister, my great-aunt Charlotte (who passed for Euro in her business life and some of her private life), both sounded like the elderly Savannah society women I heard one time on TV. My father had worked hard to eradicate all vestiges of Negroness from his voice. He sounded like a radio announcer, and sometimes his brown skin would surprise people who had first encountered him on the phone.