I was introduced to the Holocaust in school, in a unit in world-history class. I knew that, as a child, Mom had lived something of the horrors being described to us, and I asked her about it one evening. She answered—not evasively, but not fully, either. She’d been young, she told me. All that remained in her from that time were bits and pieces, more feeling than detail. Though she had been nine when the Nazis occupied Paris and thirteen when they were finally expelled, she seemed unwilling to attempt to form a coherent picture of her experiences.
For all that learning about the Holocaust had moved me, I didn’t feel any more—or any less, for that matter—Jewish as a result. Jewishness, while certainly a part of who I knew myself to be, was less immediate, less intimate, more abstract than being Black. It held no stakes. No one in my Texas town, after all, understood me to be a Jew. Seeing Afro’d, football-player me as Jewish was like trying to make sense of a pangolin or a duck-billed platypus without the benefit of a picture. Who could imagine such a thing?
In this world of complicated identities, where navigating my way through potentially hostile environments was becoming second nature, sometimes the animus came from close to home. Though in the eyes of society at large I did not exist as a biracial person, only as Black, Black friends sometimes referred to Myriam and me as “mixeded.” In so doing, they weren’t saying we were not Black. They were, however, making a distinction, one that seemed to confer a certain privilege. The distinction could also lead to conflict, should Myriam or I, however inadvertently, seem to act as though our light skin made us better. I understood that I was an insider-outsider among Blacks, too, despite claiming Blackness as my identity.
The line between keeping on to keep on keeping on and being an Uncle Tom was exceedingly thin. I learned this, too, through the example of my stepdad. I had to join him one Friday at a happy hour at the furniture-and-appliance store of his best friend, Stonie Ferguson. We were the only Black people present, and I, largely invisible in a chair off to the side, was the sole minor. Several local businessmen drank whiskey-and-Cokes or whiskey-and-sodas and told tall tales and laughed. One told a “nigger joke,” never pausing, not seeming to notice that among them was a so-called nigger—two including me, on the periphery. I watched as my stepdad laughed along with the rest of the guests.
In Amarillo, when the boy had boomed, “That great big nigger Mandingo” in the lunchroom, I’d sat there silently, recognizing the danger of speaking up. So I understood the tough spot that my stepdad was in. Few African Americans owned businesses in Borger or were city leaders. He’d worked hard and was striving to make a mark in town. But where my diminutive mom would have roared in outrage on the spot and later offered me a lesson about standing up for oneself, he never even discussed the incident. It was hard to keep from resenting him.
Not that Jack Wright was a better model—of Blackness or of maleness or just of dependability. Mom always described him as a man who, if you asked, would give you the shirt off his back; for his family in Kansas City, he was an anchor, someone to turn to. But he’d rarely sent child support for Myriam and me, and had disappeared from our lives altogether when she was nine, and I seven. When Myriam turned fourteen, she reconnected with him, and we began visiting Kansas City for a few weeks during the summer. She and I would ride with him in his yellow cab, sitting beside him on the long bench seat. We’d pick up dinner from Arthur Treacher’s Fish and Chips or Shakey’s Pizza and bring it back to his one-bedroom apartment. Sometimes our cousin Brenda and her boyfriend Al would take us to the movies or bowling.
The trips were difficult for both of us, but, where Myriam was charming and funny, I was brooding, a bit of a mama’s boy. I wanted to impress Jack Wright—as an athlete or a brainiac, or as something—but never much felt like I did.
The spring I turned sixteen, my mother and stepdad were fighting constantly and were heading toward divorce. Early in their marriage, she had confided in him a secret that she had otherwise shared only with her mother, her sister, and her two dearest childhood friends in France. Now he threatened to inform me, wanting to discredit her in my eyes. So Mom beat him to the punch. She told me about a man named Max Faladé—my “real father,” she called him, in a sheepish way that was unlike her. He was an architect, she said, and had spent his career working for the United Nations in Africa. She told me that he was from Benin, although it had been called Dahomey when she first met him.
After the initial jolt of surprise, I laughed—a deep belly laugh. I hadn’t been looking for another father. If anything, my two were too many. And here was a new one, out there somewhere in the homeland of Kunta Kinte.
I didn’t feel shame on learning that I was of the lesser so-called Third World or that I was a bastard. In fact, the joy Mom expressed while telling me about Max, her eagerness at the possibility of he and I connecting, made connecting seem important. I didn’t know French, so I wrote him in English, a warm letter, introducing myself. His reply arrived a month or so later. It was gracious, if formal, though not especially informative. He finished with: “You need to know that there is nothing for you.”
This seemed particularly insulting, as I’d asked nothing of him. I was merely saying “Hello” and “I know now.” Yet he made it clear that I was an inconvenience to him, maybe even a source of embarrassment. His response also seemed to insinuate something demeaning about my mother, and this disturbed me even more. He hadn’t expressed anything untoward, had hardly mentioned her, actually. But his rejection of me read as a slight of her.
Part of my agitation stemmed from the fact that she so obviously still loved him. She hadn’t seen him since he’d visited the hospital after my birth, and the family resemblance confirmed what my mom had claimed—that I was indeed his child. He’d offered to assume responsibility for me, as Mom told it, if she left Jack Wright. Max refused to take care of Myriam, though, which he must have known my mom would never accept. Even so, despite this obvious pettiness and manipulation, she still referred to him, all these years later, as her one true love, confiding that she had overcome an early ambivalence about Ed Wheeler because he had Max’s deep, resonant voice.