The Fluency of Light: Coming of Age in a Theater of Black and White

Fade to White

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . FadetoWhite I. Topography The Mobil travel guide I’ve checked out from the library says that Minnesota is home to “craggy cliffs” and “native prairie land where buffalo still roam.” The man who founded the city of Luvurne called it “the Garden of Eden.” There is a place known as “Blue Earth” where the ground is made of blue-black clay. I remember my freshman year of college, hanging back from the group during geology field trips so I could feel the long stretch of space exist quietly around me. I found the expanse of Minnesota at times so still that I had to listen for it, wait it out, as though it were holding its breath. I was looking down when the teacher told us, “all of this was once an ocean.” II. Rites of Passage When I was young, the only holocaust I’d heard of was stranded in a distant past. I didn’t realize that people were fleeing acts of perverse violence even then. This seems a common trick among the privileged: we teach our children about hatred as though it were a faraway land. But one day we have to break the news: that it never stopped. It never will. And what of that distant land—is that here? One thing is for sure: the refugees are coming. According to a 1946 edition of Negro Digest, experts were saying that every year between 15,000 and 30,000 Americans once classi- fied as black had “gone over” to the white side. Others thought the number of blacks who left the black community in order to pass for 30 Fade to White white annually was more like 200,000. They describe this movement as an “annual migration.” For example: after being called a “Nigger Lover” and told to leave the black section of a baseball game, one light-skinned African American man moved to the Midwest, married a white woman, and hoped his history would not reveal itself in the pigment of his children. My anthropology professor put in a video in which teenaged males in an African tribe were asked to lie down and hold still. Blades were used to slice a series of incisions, called gaar, across their foreheads. Tears and blood pooled from their heads during the initiation, but many of these young men remained admirably motionless. It startled our professor, he told us, when one day he was at the local grocery store and he saw a tall, thin man with dark skin and gaar on his head. It must have seemed as if the man had stepped off the screen of the documentary and into a midwestern landscape. I imagine the man to have been wearing a white and blue windbreaker, the cold winter sun glaring behind. Significant numbers of people have moved from the Horn of Africa to the Midwest since the 1970s. Minneapolis and St. Paul have some of the largest communities of Somalis, Ethiopians, and immigrants from the Sudan in the United States. In a book about the Somali diaspora entitled Yesterday, Tomorrow, one man explains to his son how he came to leave Somalia: “Let me tell you that we fled because we met the beasts in us, face to face.” III. Aviation According to the book Nuer Journeys, Nuer Lives, some of the women and men traveling from the horn of Africa to Minnesota feared that the plane, or “sky boat,” would fall. They found the flight “nearly impossible to endure.” IV. Bankruptcy/Insolvency The Negro Digest article notes that an investigator from the Midwest calculated, based on census data, that “in the two decades from 1890 Fade to White 31 to 1910 the Negro race in this country lost approximately 600,000 persons.” V. Bodies of Water During the first week I spent in Minnesota, we set out in canoes to float the jagged seam that separates Minnesota from Ontario. Because many routes had dried up over the summer, we waded for what felt like forever, carrying the canoes overhead in portage. The rocks were slippery and some much deeper than others. I remember the sound my shin made against rock when I fell, like a pop, even though there’s no way I could have heard it. For about ten minutes we stood still in the water, making jokes about the stories they’d tell of our disappearance. In Negro Digest...