Chizoma Sherman
        
        My mother gave me rich, brown skin, dark like the malleable earth of a clay pot preparing to dry on a windowsill. My father is the light that chases away shadows, cream for the coffee that is my mother's hands. I am a child remembering my mother and the way she touched my face, brushed against my arm in the kitchen, the way she tended seeds in her garden, her shovel plunged into the heat of the ground as the late afternoon sun began to give way to early evening. I become the soil she tilled with her rough fingertips, a fine layer of dust she carried into the house on the palms of her hands.
        On paper I am labeled black woman, defined, pigeonholed, locked into the prison of a small black circle on a photocopied form that tries, but cannot ever get to the root of my identity. I moved beyond being simply black and white when I said my first words, the first time I was called a black nigger, the first time someone looked at me, confused, and asked, "What are you?"
        I am "automatically" black. I look black, but not white. I have "black people's hair." I am simply "light-skinned," not multiracial. Sometimes people tell me what they think I'll want to hear: Chizoma, as a black woman, you are eligible for a minority scholarship. Affirmative Action at its finest. Do you want me because I'm intelligent or because I've got more pigment than the other applicants? You would like Brown University -- they've got a lot of black faculty. But what about the scenery? What are the winters like? Do the classrooms have windows?
        When I was 17, I donated blood for the first time. As I sat on a tan folding chair in the gymnasium of my high school, I filled out a donor information form that asked if I was "black," "white" or "other." I wasn't feeling particularly ornery, but I didn't feel like being an "other" that day. I colored in both the "black" and "white" circles. It was, after all, true. Satisfied, I handed in the form, sat still, and didn't speak while the technician took my blood pressure, shoved a thermometer under my tongue to guarantee I didn't have a temperature.
        Seated at a card table on yet another cold, metal chair, the phlebotomist, tired from dealing with rowdy high school seniors, glanced at the form, looked at me wearily and said, "You marked both circles." My eyes grew a little wider as defiance fought to stand in front of the ghosts in my eyes. I answered, "Yes," hoping that my chin was thrust forward in my show of adult independence. Jason, the white man in the white lab coat, an alabaster chess piece preparing for battle with an onyx opponent, looked at me squarely and said, "Which one are you today?" Quietly, shocked, I paused, swallowed, whispered, "Black," and cast my eyes downward as I felt my pawn swept from the table. Jason's eraser removed all traces of my white identity from the form in front of him. Years later, I wondered how he would have felt if, in looking up from his editing, he suddenly saw half a person sitting on the metal chair in front of him, a young woman with only one arm, one leg, an exposed and beating heart to the side of one breast, and one eye filled not with tears, but with ghosts celebrating a new victory. In the battle of understanding my racial identity, I carry the memories of every time I let someone get away with devaluing me due to their ignorance or impatience. Ghosts live in the irises of my eyes, feed on my insecurities. Hands over their transparent bellies, they laugh heartily when I allow chains to be draped across my shoulders.
        I am seven, perhaps eight years old, and my mother's hands urge a worn washcloth over my skin that has become golden brown from the sun's embrace. In the summertime, in my life, I am a combination of darks and lights, chiaroscuro, nearly white where my swimsuit has covered tender skin that will have to grow into a thick hide for protection from cruel words. The summer sun has painted my face, neck, arms and legs in bronze tones and copper shadows. Under the ministrations of my mother's faded green washcloth, my skin is years from being stretched by just one more bite of food, sustenance that is supposed to aid in the thickening of my armor, but succeeds only in making cruel words louder, fiercer. My identity isn't a question yet; I don't see my parents as any different from my friends' parents. I don't even know what an interracial couple is. My family lives among whites and Hispanics, the latter whose skin is often the same color as mine. I have not yet learned that I do not belong.
        It has never been easy to simply choose "black." I didn't grow up leaning towards one race over the other. I never became more black than more white. Being "all" black or "all" white wasn't a matter of inclination. When I wanted to show respect for my father, thank him for the part he played in my creation, I was forced to mark 'other.' Labeled that way, I began to exist in other people's eyes, opaque where I had previously been transparent. As "black" or "other," I was no longer an anomaly. I became a percentage that couldn't be defined but stood out on the form separate from being "just" black.
        Do not ask me how I define myself. Sometimes I feel as black as obsidian, a piece of coal being compressed into rock beneath the weight of the world. I never feel white. It is not possible to feel white when even I can't see it. When I look in the mirror, I am cocoa-brown skin, wild hair, hazel eyes, a half-black girl remembering to add "half-white" lest I forget.
        One afternoon when I was fifteen, I accompanied my father on his Saturday errands. As a teenager, I was not eager to be seen with him, with either of my parents in public, but he was going to teach me how to drive in an abandoned parking lot behind the mall after he bought toothpaste and lightbulbs at Target. In line behind him, I held collapsible boxes with Sylvania and Soft White Lightbulbs written in cursive down the side of the box, absentmindedly read the ingredients in Tartar Control Crest as the cashier rung up the few other items my father decided to buy: bright white tube socks for my brother; a birthday card for Grandma; Diet Coke on sale. He set his purchases down and I placed my items on the counter behind his, wishing I hadn't already spent my allowance so I could buy the super-size package of watermelon bubblegum I spied to the side of the register.
        The cashier, white like my father, swept the first few items into a bag, whirled around to her register and hit a key. "$12.72," she announced. Having done a mental count of the total, my father realized something was wrong.
        "These are mine too," he said and brought the lightbulbs and toothpaste closer towards the scanner.
        "Oh. I thought those were hers," the cashier said, not making a move for the items. I looked at my father, then looked at the bored expression on the cashier's face that seemed to say, "Hurry up. It's time for my break." My father turned his head slightly and saw that the woman in question was me.
        "No," he said and smiled, "we're together." A look crossed the cashier's face that I interpreted as pervert before she realized that "together" meant father and daughter.
        "Oh!" The cashier scanned the toothpaste, dropped it in the bag, and sacked the lightbulbs separately. She hit a few keys and glanced at the register screen. "$16.98," she said, tearing off the first receipt and throwing it away. I felt her eyes move back and forth between me and my father, almost as though she thought to herself, But she's black! Oh -- she must be adopted.
        My father asked for a pen and the cashier pulled a ballpoint from the pocket of her red Target smock. She set the pen next to my father's pale fingers and I framed their hands, realizing how familiar I was with the texture and hue of my mother's skin, how foreign two sets of white hands seemed. I remembered seeing the videotape of my parents' wedding and relived the beauty of my mother's hand, blue-black against the grainy salt-and-pepper background of the reception, as it caressed the side of my father's face that glowed brightly like the icing on the wedding cake.
        "Chi. Chi!" my father called. I snapped back, and saw the cashier trying to hand me the sack of lightbulbs, fragile, white, translucent like my father's skin sometimes appeared. "Sorry," I said and took the sack. I walked past the cashier and smiled. "Have a nice day," I said, not surprised when she didn't answer.
        Some days when I venture out into the world, I feel I must appear strange to other people. From a distance, I look black. When they get closer, I can see in their eyes that they want to approach me, that they want to ease the ghosts from my eyes. Their mouths move against the words and familiar questions echo in their minds: What is she? She doesn't look completely black. Sometimes I will smile, nod in their direction, acknowledging them without saying a word. Call me what you will. I run from and try to embrace definition. I am somewhere in between. Zebra. Oreo. Half-breed. Mulatto. Mixed. The words do not satisfy, do not stop the hunger of not knowing. I cannot be reassured that I am beautiful, that it doesn't matter what color my skin is; my friends love me anyway. It doesn't matter. The hour is too late to call friends for reassurance when I sit with the ghosts and wonder who I will be in the morning.
        

Copyright 2001, Chizoma Sherman

nidus is an online publication supported by the Writing Program at the University of Pittsburgh's English Department.