Anita Cantillo

Melanin Inheritance

Anita Cantillo

When my son asks why my skin is brown, I am thrown, left breathless by the ordinariness of his question. Its lack of presumption.

I go back to a gossamer half-memory of my own mother. Glass rosary beads corded around her wrist. Her fingers interlaced with mine, she turns our palms, traces our life lines. She is deep in comparison. Quietly, she says soy negra.

I do not remember, but feel certain my Spanish faltered. Maybe I said no, eres tan. And this is where the memory breaks,

and I am back now, with my son, but still haunted by that diaphanous memory. In the impermanence of this place, the television plays something but the sound has gone hollow, as if I am underwater.

I reach for stories to explain me, talk of coconuts that fall from palms, coffee beans that roast on sunned beds of wood and tin, I talk of yucca root. Tecate trees. Howler monkeys, maiden voyages made by leatherbacks.

I speak of native things

so he understands the origin of my brownness is his origin, too. Even if his own hands, white like beaches I have known, deny it.