We Are Family: Growing Up in an Interracial Family | CHELSEA BORROR-MASTANDREA

WE ARE FAMILY:

Growing Up in an Interracial Family

BY CHELSEA BORROR-MASTANDREA

I was born in 1991, 27 years after the Civil Rights Act was passed in the United States. Being born into a family with two black grandfathers, a black uncle, and numerous black cousins, I never considered them different than me (a very pale white woman). We are family. It wasn’t until I took a course on American Ethnic Literature that I ever really thought, especially when thinking of my maternal grandfather, that he could have been treated in a way similar to Richard Henry in Blues for Mister Charlie having lived before, during, and after the Civil Rights Movement. Living within an interracial family, much of the tensions of race relations were irrelevant and moot because we were family.

In Blues for Mister Charlie, while the focus is on the killing of Richard, there are hints of the tensions and the taboo nature of interracial relationships. In Act II, the antagonist, Lyle, his wife, Jo, and a family friend, Parnell, are discussing the acceptability of ‘race-mixing,’ as a minor character expresses it: Two distinct attitudes emerge because of this. Parnell: Ladies and gentlemen, do you think anybody gives a good goddamn who you sleep with? You can go down to the swamps and couple with the snakes, for all I care, or for all anybody else cares. You may find that the snakes don’t want you, but that’s a problem for you and the snakes to work out, and it might prove astonishingly simple - the working out of the problem, I mean. I’ve never said a word about race-mixing. I’ve talked about social justice. Lilliam: That sounds Communistic to me! (Baldwin 54)

These two attitudes - who cares who sleeps with who and how could anyone even suggest white and blacks sleep together - were prevalent throughout the United States well into my own lifetime, with nearly 2/3 of the non-black adult population stating in 1990 that they would be upset if a family member engaged in a relationship with a black person (Livingston 14). Such attitudes are distinctly American in that other nations were much quicker to accept the reality of interracial relationships, which Baldwin again uses Parnell to point out when speaking about his time at college when he mentions an African prince and how he had “Swiss women, Danish women, English women, Finns, Russians, even a couple of Americans” (Baldwin 59). The women of the story are appalled that any self-respecting woman would sleep with a black man. Likewise, Jo is later disgusted at the allegation that her husband had an affair with a young black woman, and possibly slept with many other black women, before they were married. Yet it is not only that he had an affair, but that he could have loved a black woman in a way that he has never loved her.

The acceptance (or lack thereof) of interracial relationships has often been seen as a status exchange of a Marxist nature. “Highly educated blacks would trade their educational status in order to reap the benefits associated with the racial status of a potential white spouse. Similarly, whites with low levels of education would trade their racial status for the educational status of a potential black spouse” (Gullickson 3). While another theory asserts that higher education levels lead to a greater acceptance of interracial relationships due to a greater support and understanding of racial equality.

Colloquially, it is thought that white people are often more against interracial relationships, stemming from such tropes as seen in Blues for Mister Charlie in which Jo claims she was being raped by Richard (the black man raping the helpless Southern woman) and stereotypes and stigmas perpetuated by historical facts such as “whites anxiously defended the segregation of neighborhoods, schools, workplaces, and other social settings” (Doering 561). The statistics have shown, though, that overall the opposition of interracial marriage had dropped to 14% by 2016 (Livingston 14), it is still generally disapproved of by the black community, with “black women still regard[ing] intermarriage as tantamount to betraying the race” (Doering 559). The betrayal is ancestral and a reminder of white aggression towards the black community and the oppression of the black race. An interracial relationship is an affront to black nationalism and standing African-Amer-

ican discourse, which views “sexual acts as perverse when they do not serve the purpose of reproducing a homogenous (sexually and racially) nation” (Dunning 96). In my experience and from speaking with various members of my own interracial family, I have found that as Child’s asserted in her book Navigating Interracial Borders: Black-White Couples and Their Social Worlds “Black-white couples come together across the boundaries of race and perceived racial differences seemingly against the opposition of their communities” (109). As a whole, we’ve traversed through discrimination from both the white and black communities to be a collective and cohesive whole.

DADDY: A SHORT STORY

One of the most vivid memories I have of my father: I was sitting on the living room floor, only a little girl about 3 years old or so. The carpet under my legs was a faded orange turning to brown from the small, sticky lump between my legs. My mama had brought me the lump to say goodbye. It was my baby sister. She was smaller than even my tiniest baby doll, covered in tiny, white hairs all over her body, and wet from the blood of birth when mama lost her.

It’s funny how when you’re a little kid, it doesn’t seem like goodbye holding a baby that was never rightly born - it doesn’t seem anything at all. But I knew I should be sad, because all the fantasies I had about having a playmate, best friend, and sister got flushed down the toilet my baby sister fell into after mama pulled her out of her body.

My father came into the room, and I remember being able to smell him as soon as he entered the room. The hot, stale smell of beer that radiates off a person who drinks from sunup to sundown.

“Why you crying, girl?” he slurred to me, seeing the tears falling down my cheeks and onto my dead baby sister crumpled up on the floor.

“I’m afraid when you’re done with Mama, you’re gonna start on me.” I can hear my small voice uttering words no child should ever think let alone speak aloud. And to someone who’s supposed to protect you from harm and love you unconditionally. That night, lying in bed, I could hear him screaming at my mama while red and blue lights danced through my window and onto my bedroom wall. They almost looked like I could dance to them, but I could only creep under my blanket wishing my bed would collapse into a hole I could escape into. My eyes were closed so tightly as I burrowed down deep in my bed that I could see little stars flying around the inside of my eyelids. I prayed he wasn’t coming for me next. When the lights disappeared the house was quiet, except for mama’s weeping. That’s about all I remember of my father. His temper. His shouts. His smell. And the way he made mama weep.

Mama did give me a baby sister later. One I got to play with and fight with the way sisters do. She doesn’t remember our father. When my sister, Stacey, was still very young, Mama loaded us into the car in the middle of the night. My father was lying on the couch, looking dead, but I could hear him snoring. The last thing I remember of leaving that night was his stale smell leaving my nostrils and honeysuckle entering them. That’s all I could smell as we left Virginia. To this day, it’s one of my favorite scents - it smells like freedom and emerging happiness. Mama drove us to Pennsylvania. That’s where we grew up - right outside of Philadelphia.

When I was five, I met a man with dark chocolate skin and a voice as deep as he was tall. He towered over my short, five-year-old body. His hair was almost as black as his skin, but he was missing some of it in the middle and he had big 1970’s style glasses, just like mine. I liked that. He didn’t say much, but when he did, he hardly moved his mouth. When he laughed, though, you could hear it all the way down the block - almost like Santa Claus (he had a little belly that even shook as if he were Santa). I’d never seen a man as dark as him before when we lived in Virginia. In fact, I couldn’t remember ever seeing a man that looked like him and definitely not holding my mama’s hand. I also couldn’t remember seeing mama smile like that. Mama didn’t weep anymore once we lived in Pennsylvania.

One day, mama brought this man to meet Pop pop, and I don’t think Pop pop liked him very much. He was an old man of German stock and grew up in a time when people mama wouldn’t dare hold the hand of a man with dark skin. And if they tried to, they were likely to be shot on the spot. Or worse. Before we left, Pop pop said to mama as he hugged her to leave “You know, Susan, some men won’t want to date you now that you’ve been with a black man. You’ve ruined your chances of a good marriage to a good man by dating him.” Mama looked at her father, kissed his cheek, and we went home.

But Pop pop wasn’t as unhappy as when the man took us to meet his family - I remember the very first time he took us to Philly to meet them. He and one of his sisters were in the kitchen and I heard her say, “We don’t want nothin’ to do with those white girls, Butch.” My sister and I were the only white girls in the house, so it wasn’t hard to figure out who she was talking about even though I was only six. I couldn’t understand what we had done wrong. Then I heard him say, in maybe the clearest voice I’d ever heard him speak in,

“These girls are my daughters now, and my baby is going to be their brother or sister.” He sounded angry, but I didn’t really hear his anger. All I heard was that I was going to be a big sister again. And I had a daddy again.

I shuffled away from the kitchen as I heard someone’s footsteps walking towards the living room where my sister and I and the other kids were supposed to be playing. The other kids didn’t seem to mind us, which made it even harder to understand why their mama didn’t want anything to do with us. Children don’t understand the nuances of skin color or why it should make a difference. We should all be more like children. An old man walked out of the kitchen. He looked like my daddy, but he wasn’t as dark as daddy. I could feel his eyes looking at me, but I didn’t dare meet them with my own after what I had just heard. I felt almost scared and exposed - his eyes were like ants crawling on my skin. The seconds crept by with him staring at me, and then he leaned down, looked me square in the eyes, and pulled me close.

“Girl, I’m gonna have to teach you how to box. If you are gonna be part of this family, you are gonna need to learn how to protect yourself.” He wrapped his arms around me and it didn’t feel like the embrace of someone who didn’t want anything to do with me. Looking back on it, I think he was tired of the hate. Tired of the anger. Tired of the fighting. His arms felt like my mama’s or my daddy’s. I felt like he wanted to be my Grandpop Brown. And he was.

There were only a few times I met him, but he was the one who taught me to throw a punch. At the time, I thought that was just his way of getting to know me - to spend time with his new granddaughter in his own way. Grandpop Brown knew the hate and the anger I would face.

Later that year, I got one of the best early Christmas presents any little girl could ever receive - my baby brother, BJ. After he was born, my Pop pop wasn’t so angry. He loved his “Brown Bomber” and I think he had started to love my daddy, too. Something about that little boy made the disdain for my daddy melt away. Daddy’s brother, Uncle Ranger, and his sister, Aunt Lucy, loved us just like the other nieces and nephews. I learned how to braid hair (which would come in handy one day when I had a daughter of my own) and double dutch (no one on the playground was better than me) with them on the weekends. We were a family.

In 1980, on Christmas Eve flurries fell from the sky leaving a trace of snow on the sidewalk. That day, mama and daddy got married and a few weeks later, we went to the courthouse. The wood paneled walls smelled like stale cigarettes and must. It was like nothing good had ever happened in there and the sun never got a chance to shed its cleansing, warm light. But that day, even though it was freezing cold outside and the snow was falling down, there was a warmth and hope radiating from our love. For the past two years, I had called this dark-skinned man my daddy, but that day, he really became my daddy. My sister and I went from Herrings to Browns. We never felt like we were different. We were a family.

Our family moved to a new house in an Italian neighborhood in Darby, a suburb right outside of Philly. One night, I woke up to the same dancing lights I had seen years ago when Mama and I still lived in Virginia. And for a moment, I thought I could smell my father again, but it was something different. And there was something else in the lights, aside from the blue and red flickering like a disco ball, there was a golden-orange glow illuminating the entire room. Smoke. That was the smell. I wasn’t scared like before when I hid under my blankets. Instead, I got out of my bed, feeling the cold floor shiver along my bare feet, up my legs all the way to the back of my neck. Walking over to the window, I could feel the creeping of the cold continue to encompass my heart, but I didn’t know why until I could see outside onto our front lawn.

Glaring in my face was a white cross, maybe 7 or 8 feet tall. It was on fire. Burning its image into my mind. For the first time, I understood what Grandpop Brown meant when he said I’d need to be able to protect myself. I opened my window to hear what the policemen were saying to mama and daddy, and as I did, another car pulled up. It had a small blinking light on the dash, but it was black as the night - unmarked. A tall, black man got out of the car, and fixed his police cap on his head before coming up the front walk. He stopped and stared at the cross, and to this day, I swear I saw a tear well in his eyes, and I could hear him clear his throat before continuing toward our house. Time has faded the entire conversation, but I remember him telling mama and daddy not to call the news station.

When I was a teenager, maybe 12 or 13, I remember asking mama why he would do that. Why wouldn’t the police chief (let alone a black man) not want people to know a hate crime had taken place? Didn’t he care?

“It would have been worse for us, Katie,” mama told me. And it would have. Things weren’t so bad when we were little. Growing up has a way of taking away innocence and exposing the dark depths of humanity.

Our family did what all families did in the 1980’s - we went to see all the Star Wars movies together, we went to the roller rink, we would walk around the mall together on Friday nights - we were normal. On one Friday night, mama, Stacey, BJ, and I were at the mall together. BJ and I were looking at cassettes - I wanted Madonna. “Papa Don’t Preach” was one of my favorite songs. BJ was by my side pretending he knew what he was looking at as he flipped through the cassettes in the trays when a white boy about his age walked up to him.

“Are you adopted? Why is your skin so much darker than your mom’s?” he asked. I don’t think he meant much by it. He couldn’t have been any older than 7. The innocence of children often doesn’t account for social niceties and what is considered acceptable conversation.

“No, that’s my mama. And this is my sister,” BJ answered him, sure of himself and sure of our family. Sometimes we would go to parties for someone’s birthday, or a barbeque, or a wedding. After a Fourth of July barbeque one summer, I overheard mama ask daddy why he was always so reserved at parties (not that daddy was overly outgoing to begin with). Every time I’m in a large crowd or at a party, I remember his response.

“Do you remember when we went to my dad’s funeral, and you felt out of place because most of the people there were black? That’s how I feel almost everywhere we go. Most of the places we go, most of the people are white, so I feel out of place.”

Being in the suburbs, all three of us children would walk to school. I was the oldest, then Stacey, then BJ. My sister and I were as pale as the moon - we would burn simply walking to and from school some days if the sun was just right. My brother was a caramel color brown. Most days when we would walk to school, the other kids would yell things at us. It got to the point that my sister wouldn’t walk with us anymore. Some days, my brother would come home crying because someone called him an “Oreo” or called me a “Niggerlover.” Some days, I would come home bruised up from a fight after chasing down those bigoted kids. Those were the days I was thankful Grandpop Brown taught me how to box, and those were the days I understood the most the words he had said to me the first time I met him. And when I finally got home after defending my brother, I swear I could feel Grandpop Brown’s arms around me one more time.

By the time I was 16, I thought my days of fighting and arguing were over. I fell in love with a boy with a mullet, Confederate flag on his guitar, and a grandma from the deep South proud of her family’s part in the War of Northern Aggression. I shouldn’t have been surprised when his family had reservations. One day, his grandfather drove over to the house while he was working on one of his AMC Hornet in the driveway. He pulled him inside the house and I stayed outside, but I could hear his grandfather yelling, “You can’t date her. Her dad’s a nigger.” For all his short-comings, the boy of my dreams didn’t care about what kind of family I came from.

It didn’t change the way they felt though. A few years later, when his mom remarried, we couldn’t attend the wedding for fear that our young daughter would mention that Mom Mom had married a black man. But maybe we laid the foundation for openness and acceptance. When my daughter’s father’s cousin had a child with a black man, she never got the visit we got. There were no threats. Their daughter was welcomed into the family. And at Christmas, his mom’s husband was welcome to sit at the dinner table. As the 1990’s progressed not only did their mentalities fade into acceptance, so did the rest of the world’s. I was able to raise my daughter in an interracial family. She didn’t know most of the events of this story until she began writing a paper for a graduate class. We’ve spoken about her experiences in an interracial family - having grandparents, and cousins, aunts and uncles who are black - and she never thought about it. They were simply family.

WORKS CITED

Baldwin, James. Blues for Mister Charlie. Dial Press, 1964.

Childs, Erica Chito. Navigating Interracial Borders. [Electronic Resource] :

Black-White Couples and Their Social Worlds. Rutgers University Press, 2005. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=cat05821a&AN=ecp.

EBC977461&authtype=sso&custid=s3915890&site=eds-live&scope=site.

Doering Jan. “A Battleground of Identity : Racial Formation and the African American

Discourse on Interracial Marriage.” Social Problems, vol. 61, no. 4, 2014, p. 559. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1525/sp.2014.13017.

Dunning, Stefanie. “Parallel Perversions: Interracial and Same Sexuality in James Baldwin’s

‘Another Country.’” MELUS, vol. 26, no. 4, 2001, pp. 95–112. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3185543. Accessed 8 May 2020.

Gullickson, Aaron. “Education and Black-White Interracial Marriage.” Demography, vol. 43, no. 4, 2006, p. 673. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edsjsr&AN=edsjsr.4137212&authtype =sso&custid=s3915890&site=eds-live&scope=site.

Livingston, Gretchen. “Intermarriage, 50 Years On.” Contexts, vol. 16, no. 4, 2017, p. 13. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edsjsr&AN=edsjsr.26370581&authtype =sso&custid=s3915890&site=eds-live&scope=site.