Color: Essays on Race, Family, and History

Color

Color For my mother In 1977, when my mother was in her early sixties, she needed to produce her birth certificate to apply for Medicaid, a rite of passage fraught with enormous trepidation, especially for someone of my mother’s near-ecumenical disengagement : she simply would not entertain any act of bureaucracy or officialdom; irreproachably the artist she was, my mother kept her mind uncluttered with those things she deemed immaterial . She would pay the paper lady, because everyone needed money, and she admired the woman’s truculence; yet she would never pay the water bill or the real estate taxes— and it was not simply that my father handled that; things were never that simple. It was that these commitments were beyond her compass, as cut off from her world as marzipan and a 43 mongoose. And as you might expect, in her cooking, too, there was a discreet inattention: when she would remember to include all the ingredients, she would make a splendid spaghetti; at other times, there would be a wonderfully restrained sauce, “spaghetti imaginara,” I used to call it, which would involve a slight tossing of cloves and peppers, and a faint sprit of tomato. Sometimes, in all honesty, these creations were quite marvelous: the loss of one staple, overshadowed by the pungency of another; and sometimes, with my mother’s fullest approbation, it was good that we lived in close proximity to two Chinese takeouts. Surprisingly, my mother had never been asked for her birth certificate in sixty-two years, and its whereabouts were, to put it kindly, obscure. Finally, after a flurry of scouring every possible inch in our Harlem home, even descending into her favorite hideaway, the not-to-be-touched window seat box, with its tangles of papers, my mother conceded that it had been lost. So, with little fanfare, she dutifully sent off a request for a duplicate to Boston, Massachusetts, where she had been born, and it came in the mail in a few days. My mother, as was her wont, didn’t open the letter for a week: it sat out on the library table, with the unread Crisis magazine, the AARP bulletin, and a few advertisements. But one day, after my father had come home early from the office, my mother opened the letter, and I overheard her tell him, with much force, “There must be a mistake; we have to do something; we’ll take a trip.” My mother was being characteristically theatrical, since she used to do summer repertory , but this was not her intention: she was merely reverting to a past life, where the world had made sense to her, a time in which she had acted with Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson , thrilling the summer residents of Martha’s Vineyard with weighty theatrical fare, including Five Take Away Two and The Little Foxes, a play that caused its author, Lillian Hellman— who lived on the island and attended the opening night per44 c o l o r formance—to upbraid my parents brutally for changing the word “nigger” to “Negro,” in my first encounter with the intricacies of authorial intent versus the wishes of a custodial community. Ms. Hellman, though formidable, lost the argument : she threatened to sue to stop the play, but Dashiell Hammett, her paramour, like a provident voice from offstage , pronounced, “Lillian, this play is about language—this is the world: these people.” Mr. Hammett was speaking about my mother and the others, most of whom, though mediocre actors, were heroic participants in the civil rights struggle then overtaking the country. There was Dr. David Spain, the clinical pathologist, who performed the autopsies on the slain civil rights workers Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney in Mississippi, at great personal peril; Kivie Kaplan, national president of the NAACP, who would give everyone a “Keep Smiling” card, two decades before the button craze, at a time when the world seemed bereft of anything humorous, with the seemingly omnipresent litany of dead civil rights workers, the endless legal battles, the country mired in obfuscation, nullification, and perfidy; and Bill Preston, who, in a foolhardy attempt to dramatize how the cattle prod could be used by segregationist police to “immobilize” a part of the body, stuck the small cylinder-shaped generator into his arm, and watched his fingers turn a sickly mauve, his arm as hapless as an...