16
It was late Nineteen Eighty-Seven and I was in a waiting room at
'Premier Medical Center' in Denver. So early in the morning, it was
just me, an elderly gentlemen and another patient in a small alcove
that might hold ten patients at the most. By the age of twenty-three
I had been wasting away for several years by a then undiagnosed
intestinal infection. After seeking help from local doctors it had
turned into a nightmare, my hope was that going to the vaunted
hospital in Denver would produce some positive results...
“I know what you are,” was whispered at me.
Once the third patient had been called and left the waiting area, the
elderly gentlemen had leaned forward and said this, breaking my train
of thought. “I'm sorry?” I prompted.
Even though it was just him and me in the room, he felt the need to
continue with a whisper, which betrayed a touch of a southern accent.
“I know what you are... You're part <n-word>,” he said,
then sat back with a small smile on his face.
There didn't seem to be any need for a response, so I just sat there
and pondered this for a bit. Should he get no credit as there was no
African blood in my background, or should he get half credit because
I was, in fact, mix raced? Given his accent, it occurred to
me that while he might have fingered me as mixed race in his mind, he
didn't have any experience beyond Africa Americans with which to draw
his conclusions.
It started simply enough in first grade when Paul had asked me how I
kept my tan during winter. When there was bad weather, we would have
recess in the classroom and, without playground equipment to keep us
busy, these in-door recesses would become meet & greet sessions
between the students. Paul, at one of these indoor recesses, had his
head wrapped in a bandage and I had gone up to him and asked why that
was. Turned out he had hit his head at home and was to keep the
bandages on his head for a few days. It was his turn and he asked me
how I kept my tan during winter. I looked at my arm and looked to
his and sure enough mine was a few shades darker than his. “I
don't know,” I answered as we went on to other kids to greet.
Later in the first grade year, we were doing a project where we took
twigs from outside and made some mud in the classroom and created
little model “lodges” of the type the north eastern Native
Americans had done when they had the land. Much like a log cabin, I
was tickled by the project and told my mother about it when I got
home. She told me that was where her father's side had come from,
though I didn't understand the reply at the time.
By second grade a few kids occasionally made fun of the look of my
face and, in the rare constructive experience with my mother when I
told her about it, she explained to me that her father's side of the
family was from an Indian tribe and they had taken her father's
family away from their parents and sent them to school to learn to be
white. Then her father and herself and her brother spent their life
pretending they were white even though they weren't. But Martin
Luther King had died for people's rights to be respected for the race
that they were so we no longer had to be ashamed of our background.
And so it was this time forward, that when people asked how I kept
my tan during winter, or why my face looked funny, I would tell them
of my Indian background.
In retrospect, this was the first step toward the confidante stage
in the relationship with my mother as it was the first thing that
brought us together at some level. Since my birth, my mother had
kept her distance from me except for the unavoidable times when she
had to lug me around from place to place or have me tag along during
her errands. But this was the first time in my life where she
actually just talked to me. Not that there was a lot to tell.
Primarily it was the size and build that gave her side of the family
away. My mother, at six feet, was about the same height as her
brother, but both were a couple inches shorter than my maternal
grandfather, Bumpa, and his siblings, a brother and sister of his
own. All of whom were a few inches over six feet. When my mother
was young, she was beaten by her white mother, so I was told, because
her appearance favored the Indian side of the family. Though her
brother also had the same build and features, they apparently worked
well for a boy, making them look stouter.
In her adult years, my mother had better luck passing as white by
dying her hair, first red during the Lucille Ball era, then blonde
during the California blonde television craze and onward. During her
childhood she ended up living with her aunt, Bumpa's sister, to keep
her safe from her mother's beatings. There she felt accepted and
loved and much as my sister had been my mother figure, mom's aunt had
been her mother figure as she grew up.
The only times, that she told me of, during her childhood
where her racial background would be made fun of was when they were
shoe shopping for her and the salesman would make fun of her feet and
say that she should just wear the shoe boxes themselves rather than
stuff her big feet into the shoes. Perhaps this was why my childhood
memories of family shoe shopping was of driving a long way to get to
a Five and Dime store near the Vermont/New Hampshire border
where the entire top level was a 'serve yourself' shoe room. There
one could browse the shoes on the shelves and try them on without
having to share your shoe size with a clerk. It's a style of shoe
store which has since become the norm for America, but at the time
seemed rare.
In fact, mother would tell me how her father and his two siblings all
had toe problems from them being bent and twisted around in order for
their feet to fit into the limited shoe sizes available during their
lives. In some cases, toes ended-up being amputated later in life,
or metal pins surgically implanted to straighten them back-out once
larger shoes had become available by the nineteen seventies. My
mother's own toes had become upside down letter 'U' shaped from a
lifetime of having size twelve feet in size eleven and a half shoes.
When I was thirteen I met a boy and went to his home to visit where
he forewarned me his sister was 'big boned' in place of saying she
was fat. When I got home I told my mother of this and she snickered
telling me they didn't know what 'big boned' meant. She said once
the 'Americanized' kids from Indian boarding schools came back after
being taught how to be white, White people weren't supposed to
acknowledge that they were of Native American ancestry and so
referred to them as 'big boned' or the 'big boned people' due to
their larger skeletal frame. A hundred years later the term had
devolved into meaning anyone of a surprising size.
Except for those kids in second grade who made fun of my looks, for
the most part the other children in my class didn't make fun of my
race, at least that I knew of. The handful of exceptions was my
fifth grade teacher, which I'll get to later, and an upperclassman
when I was in seventh grade.
For the first six years of school, not counting kindergarten or
nursery school, I was the closest thing to a minority kid in an all
white school district. Then in Nineteen Seventy-Six, the 'black'
family moved into the region. They had a son joining sixth grade and
a daughter joining fifth grade. Of course, the same few kids that
made fun of me during my elementary school years were now the ones
who made fun of the new black kids at school. To prove they weren't
racists, they became my 'new best friends,' to show that it wasn't
the color of the new kids that bothered them, it was 'just something
else.'
One of these self appointed 'new best friends' asked me what my mixed
background was again, I told him Indian and he responded, “Oh, well
then. I guess that does make you a Woods <n-word>,” with a
laugh.
Needless to say I never bought into their being friends of mine...
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