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Don't Play in the Sun: One Woman's Journey
Through the Color Complex
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In a hard-hitting meditation on the role that color plays among African Americans and in wider society, Marita Golden tells the story of how she has navigated through the color complex.
"Ah just couldn't see mahself married to no black man. It's too many black folks already.
We ought to lighten up the race."
—From "Their Eyes Were Watching God""This society measures progress for the Negro by how fast he can turn White."
—James Baldwin
An EXCERPT from Don't Play in the Sun
Scenes from the Color Complex: (My Own)
I am ten, standing before the gilt framed mirror over the mahogany cabinet where the silver and good china are stored. It is seven thirty and my mother my father and I have finished dinner. I have washed the dishes. My parents are upstairs in their bedroom. I stand before the mirror as I do almost every night when I have the dining room to myself . My head is draped in four long silk scarves that belong to my mother. Scarves held in place with a bobby pin at the top of my head. Scarves that are a seductive color drenched kaleidoscope whose fabric kisses my brown cheeks as I imagine a White girl's hair must brush her skin- with the most awesome feeling of affirmation, beauty and power. Standing before that mirror I am Snow White. I am Cinderella. My short, has-to-be-straightened-with-a- hot-comb- hair has disappeared. My hands, like hungry butterflies, are lost in the silky tendrils that I see with a contented, dangerous strangers eyes. With those eyes I imagine and convince myself that I can actually see the metamorphosis of the scarves into shoulder-length and even sometimes blonde tendrils that frame my chubby brown face and that at last, make me real.
* * * *
My mother in a rare mood of satisfaction with my father tells me, "Your daddy IS Black, but he sure is handsome."
* * * *
One summer afternoon,when I am playing outside, racing the boys on our street to see who can reach the end of the block first (I do), my mother comes onto the porch and as I speed past, shouts out to me, "Come on in the house, it's too hot to be playing out here. I've told you don't play in the sun, 'cause as it is, you gonna have to get a light skinned husband for the sake of your children."
* * * *
In fifth grade we learn how to square dance and are assigned partners. My partner is Gregory, an olive skinned White boy with raven-dark hair. In the center of the classroom , boys and girls face each other giggly and jittery with anticipation. We nervously wait for the square dance music to begin. Gregory stands with a hand on his narrow blue jeaned hip. His thin lips are curled in disgust at the sight of me. I am not the partner he wanted. When we square dance, we will have to touch. When we square dance we will have to be close. I had liked Gregory until this moment, when his eyes calmly, purposely erase me and I stand squirming in my new dress worn just for this occasion. I glance down the aisle of boys wondering who else could be my partner. When Miss Willis places the needle onto the record and the classroom fills with the sound of raucous, cheerful fiddle music, Gregory and I tentatively reach for each other's hands. We are reaching for each other across a centuries-old chasm of history and hate and hope and fear. When he touches my fingers Gregory jumps back and ostentatiously wipes his hands on the side of his jeans, as though now his hand will never be clean again, and walks back to his desk and sits down. I stand partnerless, exposed as what I saw in Gregory's eyes- not a girl, not his classmate, but a black and ugly and dirty thing.
* * * *
Gregory didn't want to touch me and there were boys I was afraid to touch. Boys like Russell in junior high school. Russell of the light "pretty brown" skin, and the "good" curly hair. Russell, who all the girls wanted and who on the occasions his glance slid over my face, (quickly, never long enough to give me hope), made me feel invisible.
* * * *
Perhaps I began scribbling the first lines of this book on the slate of my unconscious the near-tropical, summer day that my mother told me not to play in the sun.
I don't remember my response to my mother's admonition. Memory is at best a mere suggestion, at worst, a fiction we would bet our lives on. No, I don't remember everything about the day my mother spoke a series of words that were both edict and verdict. Words that nested beneath the tender flesh of my heart and that grew like the hardiest kudzu, impervious and confident, with a will entirely their own.
There is much that I don't remember but I can still recall the shame I felt that my mother in one sentence had judged the worth of my brown skin (negatively), dictated the necessary course of my matrimonial future, dabbled into the murky world of genetics and DNA, become complicit in the psychological oppression that victimized us both; and reinforced the larger culture and my community's traditional command to girls who looked like me: 'If you're black get back.'
Of course back then, there was no way I could articulate or comprehend the breadth of what my mother had accomplished by her words. But still I knew I had been given a life sentence. But headstrong and stubborn, I am sure that to spite my mother, and to assert my will, I continued to play in the sun.
There are so many words to describe African-Americans' pernicious, persistent dirty little secret— colorism, color-conscious, color-struck, color complex. And then there are the more specific descriptive terms that separate Blacks and create castes, and cliques, and that are ultimately definitions not of color but of culturally defined beauty and ugliness and that can end up distributing everything from power, to wealth, to love. High yellow, high yalla, saffron, octoroon, quadroon, redbone, light brown, black as tar, coal, blue-veined, café au lait, pinkie, blue-black. [Continued...]
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