I Have a Dream ~ Yes We Can!

I Have a Dream

Yes We Can!

Skin

When I was very young,
I did not know
that the color of skin
mattered to anyone.
I did not know
that it caused wars
or provoked hatred.
I did not know that skin made
one person look at another
and perceive them as ‘other.’
I did not know that skin was how
some identified ‘brother’ and ‘sister’
“us” as opposed to “them.”
When I was very young
skin was not such an important
thing.

My classmates spoke Hindi, Spanish, Afrikaans,
Arabic, French, British and Brooklynese. They
were Navajo and Japanese; Californian and Canadian;
Iranian, Iraqi and Idahoan. They came from Nigeria,
Nebraska and Nepal; from Austria and Austin; from Turkey and
Toronto, from Salt Lake City, New York City, Mexico City
and the other side of town. Our parents were academicians,
and we were experiments. In our miniature Ivory Tower, we
played. We bickered. We laughed. We whined. We sang.
We danced. We painted. We learned. We created. And skin was not
such an important thing.

                                        ~*~

When I was very young,
the one thing that I did know about skin,
was that my own
was in arrears.
I never thought of my skin
as being any color at all,
I knew only
that it was
not-brown.

I knew that it should be brown,
or should turn brown,
was supposed to become brown,
but that it wasn’t, didn’t, wouldn’t.
The luckiest began that way, the rest
were baked by the long barefoot summers
of childhood slowly to cinnamon,
softly to sepia, leisurely to olive,
but I remained the same. Color below zero,
year-round winter skin, negative pigment,
not-brown

Eternally, either
not-brown
or
blistered scarlet;
screeching fire engine red,
endless nights spent nauseated and crying,
shrouded with wash clothes
that my mother soaked
again, and again in ice water.
The brilliant, burning sun of summer
caught beneath my stretched skin;
trapped and bursting backwards,
rays of scorching, shrieking heat that
seared and sanded every nerve until it screamed.

Once the anguish of the heat had passed,
I was rubbed carefully
With Pacquins lotion and the
viscous goo that oozed
from my mother’s aloe plant,
forced to wear long sleeves
in the sweltering, shimmering summer heat.
During the perilous hours
Between eleven a.m. and two p.m.,
while everyone else swam, skated,
and ran wild under the broiling sun,
I played alone in the long green shade
of the front porch, telling my dolls
in conspiratorial whispers:
“Only mad dogs and Englishmen
go out in the midday sun . . .”

When at last the flaming skin turned
from red to gray, it peeled away
in long, pale strips, which were totally gross,
yet quite fascinating.
For a few days, I was everyone’s favorite,
slightly disgusting, past time.
I peeled, healed, and returned to
not-brown.
Until the next time.

                                 ~*~

And we grew older,
and The Real World besieged
our Ivory Tower’s walls. It screamed from
every newspaper, it shrilled from
the television screen. Socratic Debate, Method of Elenchos,
they taught us with questions. Socratic Method,
Elenchos Debate. They taught us to question.
They explained about segregation. About separate
schools, buses, drinking fountains.
Baffled, we looked at each other and we asked them
“Why?”
They gave us historical facts, they proposed queries
about geographic and cultural parameters, but no one,
no one ever answered that
question.
We learned that the color of skin mattered.
We learned that the color of skin mattered
immensely to some.
We learned that the color of skin mattered
out of proportion, to a degree that was absurd,
to an extent that seemed insane.
Baffled, we looked at each other, we looked
at skin that was
every shade from white to ebony.
None of us were the same color.
We didn't
understand
and we asked them
“Why?”
They gave us cultural facts, they proposed queries about
historic parameters, but no one,
no one ever answered that
question.

                                           ~*~

Not quite as long or as pastoral as childhood’s,
early-adolescent summers were spent ‘Laying Out,”
long brightly colored beech towels
on the hot, slanting shingles of someone’s roof.
We talked about boys, read aloud from magazines,
drank warm coke and slathered each other’s backs
with cocoa butter.
We sprayed our bodies with fine mists
of water and olive oil, flipping ourselves
like burgers on a grill, every fifteen minutes.
Striving, straining, sweltering, sweating, seeking
The Perfect Tan.

Still long before the advent of sun-block
with SPF-Anything, I sat cross legged,
covering my shoulders with another towel.
I wore a big, wide brimmed hat,
I brought an umbrella and everyone laughed.

Aware of my skin now; so aware that I
was on a first name basis with each blemish,
every freckle and flaw.
The perfect 36, 24, 34 that filled my bikini
was in no way perfect, for every inch was
not-brown.
When arms were held out, placed together
to ascertain who had ‘The Best Tan,’
I put my arms behind my back.
“Look how WHITE you are!” they’d exclaim.
Teenagers excel at insensitivity.

And they were wrong.
I looked, and I wasn’t.
I wasn’t white.
I wasn’t any color.

I learned desperate measures.
Using a sun-lamp, I’d burn on purpose,
soak the reddening skin with
apple-cider vinegar, which stung
like a razor’s edge, but produced
the deep, dark, long coveted, positive color:
BROWN.
I smelled like edu du tossed salad and
like Cinderella, I had to be home
by midnight, when the brittle skin would begin
to fissure, crack, flay and peel
often leaving me bleeding underneath.

                                              ~*~

I was born during litigation of Brown vs. the Board of Education.
I began school at my small Ivory Tower the same week that Elizabeth Eckford walked through the doors of Little Rock High School.
On the third day of the fifth grade, Wednesday, August 28th, 1963, on an elsewhere-yet-unheard-of classroom television set, I watched Dr. Martin Luther King give his “I Have a Dream” speech, as it happened. My teacher told us we had seen the future.
Five years later, I watched Dr. King fall to the floor of the balcony where he stood and I knew that he would die.
There was no one else there, so I asked the empty air: “Why?”

Why did he die?
Did he die for the perfumed jungle flowers of Africa?
Did he die for the stench of the Birmingham jail?
Who would take up the sword
the Peaceful Warrior did not carry?
Would anyone remember the purpose of his life?
Or only the reality of his death?
Would they remember the radiance of his vision?
Or only the color of his skin?

And I . . .
Am I who I am because the Nordic sun
dwells cold and dark for months each year?
Does my substance lie hidden in the colorless, frozen Scandic snow?
Does fate hold me bound,
because my ancestors sailed a frigid, ice spumed sea,
instead of dancing beneath a blooming tropic sun?

Who is permitted to speak of beauty?
What face is it allowed to wear?
Has discrimination died or has it rebounded?
Will we ever hear it’s death knell,
Or only an echo of it’s abiding birth?
To whom is The Dream sanctioned?
To whom will it be denied?

And in all the heart of heaven,
Why should it matter?
This color of skin?
Why should it ever have mattered?
Why?

No one,
no one has ever answered that
question.
   
                                           ~*~

        He said my skin was the color of alabaster,
        alabaster filled with moonlight . . .
        and I cried

           

©Edwina Peterson Cross

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