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Continued: An EXCERPT from Don't Play in the Sun
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But that day my mother spoke none of those words. She didn't have to, for by then I had absorbed everything I needed to know about color. I knew how deeply imbedded was the culture's obsession with White defined beauty, whether it was manifested in the icon-status of Marilyn Monroe, or the light skinned "good haired" Black women smiling from the cover of Jet or Ebony. Ebony and Jet were, in the years of my childhood, the premier tabloid barometers of Black political and social reality. They were also a kind of scrapbook in which the masses of Negroes got to see proof-positive, the success and upward mobility of the most prominent members of the race. And while there were brown to black men and women profiled in these "bibles" of the Black community, it seemed to me that the Negroes who had managed to pull off the most amazing feats of achievement (Massachusetts Senator Edward Brooke, Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall ), those we referred to as "Negro Firsts", were usually light-skinned. How was I to conclude anything other than because I looked like exactly what I was, a "Negro," I was less valuable, less legitimate, less real to nearly everyone around me.
I was eight years old the day my mother warned me not to play in the sun and I already knew that I was invisible. I had not read Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. Toni Morrison had not yet written The Bluest Eye. But already I had tasted the essence of racial and colorist tragedy. I feasted on it every day. I had parents who loved me, a nurturing family, many friends. I was smart in school, was often considered the teacher's pet. And I also knew that the specific physical traits that comprised my racial identity were despised.
Words had informed me of this. The words from family and friends that showered praise and compliments on lighter hued, straighter haired children for their beauty, words that I never heard used to describe brown to black children. Words like "Isn't she so pretty?" uttered with a sharp intake of stunned breath, eyes bulging in near-disbelief, at the sight of a curly haired light-skinned toddler. Words like "Just look at that hair!" (Translation: it was long, straight, thick.)
"Look at those eyes" (Translation: maybe they were light brown or green or grey). All the words I heard. All the words I read. And for a long time, all the words I could imagine thinking or writing supported skin color apartheid. As a child, I already knew that the world was a pigmentocracy. And I knew where I fit in that hierarchy.
In the 1950's I grew up in a largely segregated world. The only White people I came into contact with were teachers at school and a few fellow students in Washington D.C.'s even then majority Black school system. So I rarely heard words directly from the lips of Whites, addressed to me, or to other Blacks that assessed our relative beauty. But Whites had created another, ongoing, invasive and seductive and powerful conversation about beauty and color through movies and television and magazines and books and the collective imagination. And the language of that conversation was both an echo of the self-hating dialogue among Blacks about skin color, and its progenitor.
"Don't play in the sun. You're going to have to get a light husband for the sake of your children as it is." Say the words silently. Listen to them and hear the anguished reverberation of the voice of three-hundred years of mental suicide. The admonition is filled with so much fear, and so much dread. The sun, which is a symbol of life, growth and power, in my mother's warning, becomes a threat, a harbinger of danger. My mother's words were filled that day, with as much emotion as trembles in the voices of mothers today, warning their children not to play in the sun because of the fear of skin cancer. And yet for my mother, darkness, blackness, in its own way was a kind of disease whose progress, in its assault on me, she felt she had to try to halt.
I had seen the famous Coppertone ads for sun tan lotion. I knew that White people worshiped the same sun that my mother warned me against. But I also knew that Whites' desire to possess a glaze of color in the summer did not mean they wanted to be Black. I knew that Whites could despise blackness and yearn for some measure of it at the same time.
I always had to be vigilant. Blackness, darkness, and its assumed resultant calamities could silently invade and possess me, even as I was engaged in innocent games of play. The threat of blackness hid, silent, waiting, even in the powerful lightness of the sun.
"You're going to have to get a light-skinned husband for the sake
of your children."
I was lost. It was too late to save me from darkness, but if I married
a light-skinned man there was hope for my children.
My mother was well aware that the world attempted every day to erase me. She knew how little love lay in wait, how few open arms stood ready to embrace little brown skinned girls with "nappy" hair and wide noses. My mother had not constructed that world. Unable to challenge the beliefs about beauty and self-worth that she had inherited and that had shaped her attitudes, my mother strove nonetheless, to warn me of the pitfalls and traps of the world she had not made but knew not how to destroy. From the vantage point of the present, I know now that those words, so harsh, and so brutal, were offered to me, not as the punishment I heard, but as an act of love and protection.
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