When I Became Black

I have to preface this by saying that my skin color is not brown, let alone black.  Even when I’m tanned, which hasn’t happened for so long that I forget what that feels like, I’m definitely a “white” person.  That’s so much the case that in my younger day kids in school used to say to me that I didn’t look Cuban.  That came from other white kids, naturally, and my response was always that they didn’t look American.  They had to think that one through.

Anyway, the Cuban thing is what makes me write that, white though I am, I know when I became black—not physically, needless to say, but emotionally and with complete and total fellow feeling.

 

It happened when I first got off the bus that took me from my home to the bus terminal from which I then walked the couple of blocks to my elementary school.  The first thing I noticed, because I was so nervous in going to a new school that I had to pee very badly, was that there were four toilets, each clearly marked not just by sex, the regular “Women” and “Men,” but also by color.  “White Women,” “Negro Women”; “White Men,” “Negro Men.”  I went into the “White Men” toilet because what did I know.  When I came out I wanted a drink and so noticed the two water fountains, one refrigerated for “Whites” and one not refrigerated for “Negroes.”  I wanted refrigerated water.  It was Florida in late summer, after all.

 

But what cemented the discrimination of apartheid in my little brain was the restaurant, a greasy spoon that was the only place to eat at that bus depot.  It had a sign above the door, neatly printed with the caption “NO NEGROES,” and under that also neatly printed “NO DOGS.”  Since Cubans were beginning to be a population to worry about—I’m talking 1961—the restaurant owners decided to scrawl in Magic Marker a new caption:  “NO CUBANS.”

 

My little brain, unsophisticated as it was at age 9, saw the point.  I was a stranger in a strange land, and my fellow strangers in a strange land were the African Americans who were as excluded from the restaurant as I was.

 

Oh, I could pass, to be sure.  Pale of skin and pretty adept at English, no one could tell by looking at me or listening to me that I was one of those.  But I knew that I was one of those.  And from that point on, I never but never tried to pass myself off as one of “us.”  I was happy being one of those.

 

As I got older I came to recognize that Blacks in America had a much much harder world to transit than I did, one of those though I was.  No one followed me when I went into a store.  No one suspected me automatically of being a thug or a vagrant or a threat.  Some of that has to do with the fact that I’m so short and puny that I can barely kill a mosquito without a swatter.  But some of it also has to do with the fact that, as the kids in my school said, I don’t look Cuban.

 

In any case, I also had a social and cultural support system that, I discovered, most Blacks in the 1960s, and maybe even the 2020s, just didn’t have.  Almost everyone in my family was highly educated.  Almost everyone in my family had access to books, the memory at least of wealth and status, a history of accomplishment, a “superior” place in the social hierarchy—not in Miami, to be sure, but exile did not define who we were.  There was just no question ever raised that I would work hard at school, do well, go on to college then some post-graduate program, and be a “success.”

 

I know perfectly well that many Blacks had the same sources of pride and place in their own backgrounds—some were then and still are my good friends and they introduced me to the riches of their history and achievements.  And I've come to know some of those riches first hand, teaching African American literature for many years.  But many Blacks do not have such a support system, and the result is that the apartheid I encountered back in 1961, although no longer legal, has a social afterlife that continues to make it very difficult to be Black in America.

 

As I said to begin with, I am not quite like the white cliffs of Dover, but white I am.  But I became black when I got off that bus at the depot.