#ANTHROPOPHAGY LUCIFORM SKIN#

: Grandfather Jim was lynched because he would not dance. I think she thought the same thing would happen to me that happened to my Grandfather. My mother had just about had enough of me. I had piled some bricks and watch for them to come pass. Three white men push my brother into the street. One Saturday evening my brother Bennie and I was up town (that’s what we call it – up town). When I finished talking with them, they were more than glad to return all my money. Remember I paid cash for the car, therefore I did not owe them anything. They wanted to charge me $8500 for keeping the car two days. Told her to tell me to have the car back to them Sunday morning. That Saturday night it was two carloads of white men came to my mother’s house. In 1943 I bought a 1939 Chevy car on a Friday. As you can see, stubbornness runs deep in my family. He wrote this a few years ago, I’ve just transcribed it. So while getting back to work on this blog, I thought I’d share a story from him. Although it was expected (he’d been sick for awhile) and he had lived a long life (he was nearly 90), it’s still…a thing. My grandfather passed away a week ago last Sunday. This entry was posted in thinking about race and tagged ashland, cultural understanding, family, memories, race, travel on 31. Thank goodness for the internet. How my mother did this before she could just order hair products from Amazon, I do not know. Or hair products – things that I’ve always been able to get everywhere I’ve been – is a revelation. The simple fact that I can’t buy stockings, I don’t think I really understood what that meant until I came here.

Many people there had never seen anyone who was black live and in person. My mother told me stories of when she first came to my home town. Children would come up to her in stores and rub her hand to see if the brown would come off. Not the kind that says, “My soul is grown deep like the rivers.” This is the Other kind. Now, this is not the kind of black that I feel when I visit family in the South, or see fields where people who looked like me spent thousands of hours in the hot summer sun. But I’ve never felt blacker in my life than I do in Ashland. I’ve traveled to the American South – visited plantations in Mississippi and Louisiana. I’ve spent long periods deep in Trenton and Atlantic City as well. I’ve been to London, Hanoi, Saigon, Rio, Salvador da Bahia, Vienna, Athens, Prague, Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam. When I did, more often it was because of my bank balance.

#ANTHROPOPHAGY LUCIFORM SKIN#

But I rarely felt out of place because of my skin color. I learned that I could more easily blend in certain neighborhoods (Washington Heights – Dominican Bed-Sty – Black) than some of my friends that I could blend as easily in other neighborhoods (the Village, Midtown) and that I had to work a bit and rely on learned behavior in others (uber fancy restaurants, Upper East Side). the trains, certain parks), but there are places that are less shared (look around the McDonalds and then look around a random East Village Thai place). I read an editorial in the Guardian (I think) the other day that made a good point – NYC has shared spaces (i.e. Famously a melting pot, though it’s not quite as melty as NYC would want you to believe. (But I should also note that the campus I was on was mostly white, so maybe that says something about me too.) I was just another freshman from the east coast. Where I was, there were far more latinos than black people. The first place I lived that wasn’t my small town was LA. So I knew other kids growing up who’s skin would get ashy and who knew why I freaked out about getting my hair wet.

My parents had friends who were white, but also many who were black. I grew up in a small, mostly white, town. Never before have I been so interested in being black. I wrote this a couple of months ago and never got around to posting it, so, here tis:

Anthropophagy luciform