Love in a Global Village: A Celebration of Intercultural Families in the Midwest

Black Is Black: Murtis & Nana

Black is black murtis& nana Nana & Murtis. Photo by Christy Mock. ne day, many years ago, Murtis Grant-Acquah was chatting with a white couple, strangers, at a YMCA near her suburban Milwaukee home. They were joking about mundane things, the noise the children in the building made or the hassles of family life. It was the sort of casual camaraderie that can sometimes lead to a real connection — when you find you are nearly neighbors or have children in the same school. To Murtis it seemed like just that sort of conversation : she’d learn their names, maybe, wave to them across the grocery store parking lot. So she was more than a little surprised when the couple’s four-year-old child walked over to her, kicked her in the shoe, and said, “I don’t like niggers.” The parents said nothing, just picked up their child and walked away. “What could they say?” asks Murtis. That child did not come up with those feelings on her own, Murtis points out, “She got that from her family” — the very family Murtis had been joking and laughing with moments before. That moment, for Murtis, was paradigmatic. If behind the smiling faces of that YMCA family lurked such blatant race hatred, who could say that every other smiling white face didn’t likewise cover some ugly, unexpressed feeling. Murtis was born in Forest, Mississippi, and grew up in Milwaukee , but it was her early experiences in Mississippi that have marked her thinking about race, convincing her of the pervasive nature of white American racism. “I guess growing up in America, being from the South,” she says, “I always strongly felt the differences between the races. Black is black and white is white.” In the world of her childhood, people were either white or black, and any other differences were irrelevant or invisible. White people, across { Murtis & Nana } 221 O class and religious difference, were to be avoided; and black people, despite any possible differences, felt a certain solidarity. It is not surprising, then, that when Murtis met her African husband , Nana, she did not think of him as a cultural other because he wasn’t the other — he wasn’t white. When we ask her in the interview about meeting Nana for the first time, about time they spent together early in their relationship and how their differences of nationality manifested themselves then, Murtis comments only on the minor difference of Nana’s accent. “He just spoke funny. That’s probably the only thing that I noticed ,” says Murtis. “I didn’t speak funny, I just spoke in a way that was probably different,” Nana objects. “Okay, okay,” Murtis agrees, laughing. Except for the sound of his voice, she didn’t feel any barrier between them at all. The ease of their understanding she wraps up in one neat package. “He’s black,” she says simply. Likewise, about the African college students who were his colleagues at the time she says, “Black is black. We’re black folks, we’re just different, that’s all.” They were all, therefore, in the same boat; according to Murtis, there were no relevant differences.· Nana and Murtis met in a genetics class in Platteville, Wisconsin, in 1971. Nana had a strong background in the material and he tutored Murtis that semester. They prepared for exams and did homework together, and eventually Murtis included Nana in the circle of friends who came to talk and eat, party and study in her dormitory. It didn’t occur to her to make a distinction between African and African American blacks, and she thought her friends felt the same. The campus was so small, only 9,000 students, and 222 { Black Is Black } the number of black students, African or African American, tiny. She moved among the African and African American students with an easy, assumed camaraderie and soon included Nana’s African friends among the network of people who came and went in her dormitory room. The African students “were people,” Murtis says emphatically, “they were black people.” Nana remembers things a little differently. “In Africa,” he says, “we didn’t think about the separation of the races.” He was much less likely to see other black people as certain allies. He did not, in fact, always experience them as allies. He agrees that Murtis made no distinction between the African and African American students, but he...