When Race Becomes Real: Black and White Writers Confront Their Personal Histories

Country Music1

© Susan Rae Lakin 283 Country Music1 Susan Straight Some people were incredulous, some amused, and some slightly unhappy when I let my three daughters listen to country music. I mean, they chose it, they changed the radio stations and sang the songs in the car and danced in the kitchen to “Prop Me Up Against the Jukebox if I Die” and “All My Exes Live in Texas.” But there were people who thought I shouldn’t encourage them by allowing it, by listening as they recited all the lyrics to the songs in the country top forty and chose their favorite heartthrobs: Bryan White, with teenybopper looks, and Alan Jackson, with blond curls to his shoulders. Because, since this country classifies people according to their racial makeup, my daughters are black. Their father is African, Native (Creek and Cherokee), and Irish American. But I’m the one always in the car and the kitchen with them, the one who laughed when they sang along with Alan about waitresses and the Chattahoochee. As far as looks go, I’m as white as people come. It was my genetic heritage that, accidentally , caused the country music idolatry. 284 S u s a n S t r a i g h t My mother is from Switzerland, and two years ago I took my entire family, husband and children, mother and father, to her country of birth for a long vacation. We met scores of relatives, which thrilled my daughters. They swam with cousins who were Swiss and Italian, they met village friends, and they communicated however children do. In evenings and on rainy days, however, stuck in our rented cabin in the high mountains, there was only one English-language TV station: Country Music Television. It was hilarious to watch. We don’t even have cable in America, and my kids hadn’t been exposed to the imaginative power of videos. They were enthralled as love song after love song played, with cowboy-hatted girls dancing and kissing cowboy-hatted men whose faithfulness and/or apologetic natures were displayed with heartbreaking grins. My daughters are quick, good with words, and sentimental—like me. They fell hard, in love with the neatly encapsulated video stories, with the rhyming lyrics (perfect for elementary-school-level memorization), and with the stars. All of whom were white. Patriotic, down-home handsome , white-bread white. My mother, who emigrated to America at eighteen and actually loved Patsy Cline and Loretta Lynn back then, was bored with what she saw as vapid lyrics and tepid vocal skills. She couldn’t believe my daughters ’ fervor lasted all vacation and continued when we returned to California , where they made me buy Country Music Weekly and play Alan Jackson cassettes in the car. My husband wasn’t thrilled, either. We’re in our thirties, not hardcore rap fans but funk and R&B devotees since we met in high school. While I laughed at the girls’ devotion and thought it was good that they were learning to read, even if it was song lyrics about drinking and crying , and to sing, even if it was about broken hearts and dying, he was the one who took them to his father’s house, since there they could watch Country Music Television on cable. Surrounded by black relatives and friends, they sang along with their country-blond favorites, not noticing the occasional frowns of people wondering if maybe our kids had started to think they were white. White is an interesting concept to children—at least to mine. For several years, my daughters considered it merely a descriptive shade. In preschool and kindergarten, where they have classmates of all colors, C o u n t ry M u s i c 285 they referred to children’s hair and skin color merely to identify them. Race was not a complex combination of language and history and class, not a varying collection of tastes in music, food, and dress. But as they are growing older, I sense that this is what race seems to them. A construct . What a person uses to construct him- or herself, on the scaffolding of skin color. When I examine whiteness this way, often it comes down to something as comic as definitive. In high school, when I was already dating my future husband, I watched the chameleon-like transformations of one girl I’ll call Layla. I remember...