ChandlerThe first five years of my life were good years. My halcyon days, my true childhood. I entered this world and found it to be wondrous and full of fascination. I was lucky. We, my mother, father and I, lived in a small white house at the end of pebble driveway in the small town of Bernardsville, NJ. There were six acres of land associated with the house and much of it ran into the forest that stretched, as far as I knew, infinitely out beyond our back yard. My mother came from a progressive white New England family and my father... My father is a more complicated creature. My father¹s side of the family is a mixture upon mixture of black, white, American Indian, you name it, but standing at 6¹ 4² with black kinky hair, black mustache, brown skin and all the attitude, my father was a black man and I was their little, pensive, wild man.
My memories of friends and family, at that time, swirl into a kaleidoscope of black and white faces. I never imagined that the world could be any different or that I was part of something special, beautiful and therefore ephemeral. People were people within our little racial utopia. I was a tan, pot-bellied kid with dark floppy curls and I accepted the world as it presented itself to me. I might have gone to Massachusetts to see my maternal grandmother and be suddenly surrounded by all whites or I might have gone to Boonton, NJ to spend time with my other grandmother and find myself in the midst of my tall, darker relatives who lapsed into such interesting and animated tales after dinner. No one experience was any better than the other, just different. I was more concerned with running through the forest, climbing trees, digging a hole to China in our backyard, and staring out the window than I was with pondering my existence as an amalgamation of black and white parents. Such awareness did not surface for a long time.
In 1977 life brought changes as it is apt to do. My family decided to move into New York City and much of my childhood was left behind. I now think of the days that were to come as darker days, but back then I just accepted my new realities as they came. New York was too full of surprise and excitement to allow time for reflection. I suppose any longing for my past was erased by the insistent flow of new information. Once again, nothing presented itself to make me question my own identity or race. I found myself surrounded by millions of different faces, colors, ethnicities etc. and the kaleidoscope through which I saw the world only became only more expansive.
My memories of New York are faint or perhaps just too blurred together. I can only see things in chunks of time. My brother was born, we actually brought him from New Jersey as well, but I can¹t remember him there, only in the City. I remember schools that I went to. I suppose the closest I came to realizing my ethnicity at that age was when ³The Empire Strikes Back² came out and my friends thought that my father looked like Lando Calrissian but I wasn¹t offended. I thought that was cool. But as the domestic situation became more and more volatile and as my brother, mother and I saw less and less of my father, I did begin to see that I was losing contact with my black side. Weekends at Grandma Ernie¹s became glimpses into our black heritage. My brother and I both savored the moments when our father would take us out to Wilson¹s in Harlem for grits, fried eggs and bacon or to the ribs joint next to the liquor store with the bulletproof glass. We began to understand that we had access to two different worlds, one of which our white mother was completely denied. Yet, still, there was never any pressure on us to choose. Ultimately, as our father became more obscure in our lives and our mother was left alone to raise two children, the choice was made for us.
I had grown up fast. My father told me that when he wasn¹t around I was the man of the house. I became the man of the house as best as I could. As I said, those were darker days.
At fourteen I went to boarding school. No one sent me. I wanted to go. I needed to get away. I ended up at an elite school called Phillips Exeter Academy. In a predominantly white prep school, I always found it funny that my best friends were Puerto Rican, Jewish, Lebanese/Italian, Korean, Indian, Chinese and there were a few whites in the mix. Again, I seemed to glide through without much angst concerning my background. I was proud of my heritage and it was no secret but I suppose I blended in so well that people saw what they wanted to see. There were only three occasions when my blood boiled. The first I can barely remember, just my anger and my understanding of a white boy¹s ignorance. The second was during a Secret Santa ceremony in my dorm. The prep school version of Secret Santa consists of giving as demeaning and spiteful a present as possible so that others can look on in merriment a the recipient¹s discomfort. One senior called everyone up and gave each person their gift. Most accepted the abuse and then sat down, happy that attentions would soon be focused on the next in line. When it was my turn and I approached the front of the room, there wasn¹t much laughter. The senior handed me a bag. I opened my first present, a hairpick.
³Pretty funny,² I said deadpan, my whole body filling with caged fury.
³I know. It¹s beat,² he said quietly with his head down. He wouldn¹t look in my eyes. ³Here¹s another one.²
He handed me a second bag. I opened it and pulled out a snowglobe with a zebra inside it. I held up the hairpick and snowglobe so that whole room could see. No one laughed. I went back and sat and felt isolated in my emotions and also amazed that my Secret Santa had managed to find a zebra snow globe out in the middle of nowhere in Exeter, New Hampshire.
The third was after college acceptances. I had been fortunate and had gotten into all but one of the colleges I had applied to. I was in the student gallery and an African-American student approached me. He was two years younger but we were both from New York and had hung out together in the city. He whispered that some people in his dorm had complained that they wished that they could have simply put down that they were black to get into the schools of their choice like I did. It was an attack. His pejorative tone clearly accused me of using my veiled ancestry to get into college.
I pulled him outside. My conscience had weighed heavily on me during the application process. My father had said that I didn¹t have to ³prove myself to nobody² and that I should check whichever box that would help me get into college. I had appealed to my advisor who was African-American and he had sighed heavily and then left the decision up to me to ³do what I felt was right.² My grandmother told me to make another box and check human. Check one box? Screw it. I decided to check anyone I thought applied to me. I checked Caucasian and I checked African-American. And as my blood boiled again, I told that friend exactly what I had done. It angered me that I felt I had to justify my actions to him and that he had some position of power over me because of my insecurity regarding my ³blackness.² But I hadn¹t lied to anyone and I felt that my integrity remained intact and with that I graduated high school.
College. College politics. I decided that I wanted people to know who I was when I went to college. I enrolled in the minority pre-orientation and went to school a week early to meet the other freshman of color. Mirror, mirror on the wall, who was the fairest of them all? Me. But it was gooda and there were good vibes. But then school started and the politics began. The different groups that had been cool with each other suddenly became polarized and each claimed its own. If you weren¹t ³down² then you were to pay your dues and become down. I was me. I wasn¹t ³down,² and I wasn¹t about to change for anyone. Through the years I saw one Latino guy metamorphose from a truly genuine person, who had reached out to others during orientation, into a thug. He had wanted to be down and had made his sacrifices. His path was not for me.
There was a group called B.O.M.B.S. (Brown¹s Organization of Multi and Bi-Racial Students). I became a member. We would all gather on Sundays in the Third World cultural center and talk about our individual experiences as children of mixed marriages. Like mutts in the dog pound we came in all shapes, sizes, and colors and from every cultural and socio-economic background, but it was within our differences and isolation that we found a common bond. One day as we went around the room introducing ourselves, I happened to be the last in line. Many before me had shared heart-felt stories about the difficulties of conflicting racial identities, the lookism that pegs many of us into pre-defined categories, and the pressures that minority cultures exert on their members to decide on one ethnicity and to be ³down.² They got to me and I looked at them and I said, ³If this is B.O.M.B.S. and as members we¹re the Bombers, then I¹m the Stealth Bomber.² I was referred to as Stealth for the rest of the meeting. But B.O.M.B.S. inherently couldn¹t provide a community for us ethnic bastards. We were too disparate a group to have any real cohesion. It could only provide some recognition, solace and compassion for our shared plights.
Freshman year I ended up going out with a girl who was part of the ³down² crowd. It seemed that I snuck in through the back door and snatched her up, because there were a number of brothers who were none too happy about our romance. Welela was dark and beautiful, of Ethiopian descent. She would constantly bag on white folks for this or that and I would ask her what she thought I was. Unequivocally she said that I was black. One day she decided that she wanted us to go to The Gate, a snack bar on campus where black folks liked to gather to watch television. I guess she wanted to make us public knowledge. So, we went and my spidey sense tingled, anticipating conflict. We sat quiet and sullen at a table set a little apart from the group. After a while, Anthony approached us. He called Welela out, calling her a ³perpetrating nigger² but perhaps meaning me or us both, I don¹t know. Anthony was the leader of the core black folk. He was downer than down, blacker than black, more ghetto than ghetto and I looked at him with his J. Crew mail order outfit and his disparaging attitude toward white folk, while he dated white women, and I knew he was wrong. I knew, but I was shamed by my own insecurity concerning my blackness and wasn¹t able to say anything. I should have gotten up in his face and challenged his disrespect. I should have risked the black eye. But my insides turned while my guilt made me sit and do nothing. We got up and left and I felt that I had my tail between my legs. Welela and I didn¹t last much longer after that. She went back to them and I went with whoever my friends were.
Never again, I told myself. Never again was I going to let anyone make me feel guilty because of the color of my skin. One hundred and fifty years ago, I may not have been picking in the fields, but, surely, I would have been serving in the house.
College coasted by, or I coasted through college. I emerged into the real world and moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career in the entertainment business. As I met people and went from job to job I seldom revealed my blackness to anyone that was white. I took tremendous pleasure in being able to present myself to other people of color to let them know that I was there and that I had their back. As I left them, I always felt that I was returning to the front lines. I was Stealth and I was infiltrating white society to see who was who and hear what the white ³open-minded² folk really thought.
And I¹m still here, mercurial, slipsliding my way through life, judging each person as they come. At times, I see a bunch of black folk and it saddens me that I can¹t flash a badge or do a secret handshake that would identify me as one of their own, without an explanation and without the fear of rejection. But I accept my role. I walk my own path and I belong to no one and no group. I continue to be me, pure and simple.