My Sky ~ Multiracial Family Life

We are on a family vacation, staying in a lake ‘cottage’ that has been in my husband’s family for 100 years. (I put quotes around ‘cottage’ because it has seven bedrooms and five bathrooms.) Our children are the sixth generation in my husband’s family to come here. There are 28 cottages in the association, set in a row along the edge of the lake. The cottages pass through family members, and in order for a cottage to be sold, the association membership has to vote to accept potential new owners.

My children are the first people of color in direct line to inherit a cottage. Actually, let me be more precise. In the history of the cottage association, there have been less than a handful of people of color present here, as guests, visitors, anything.

Teri and I flew (toddlers are miserable on long car trips) and arrived here a day before my husband and the three older kids. On a walk along the front path on Friday morning, my mother-in-law introduced me and Teri to some of her old friends as we passed them. Nobody said anything about or to Teri. It was as though she wasn’t there.

We had a cocktail party last night to celebrate my husband’s grandfather’s 90th birthday. I dressed the girls to the nines: summer cotton party dresses and french-braided hair. (Rico dressed himself in a snap-front western-style shirt, shorts, and a backwards baseball hat. He complained that he didn’t like this birthday party because there were no kids and no cake.) The part of me that wants my kids to look clean and brushed kicks into overdrive here. I know my family does not slip by unnoticed anywhere, but in a place like this, all eyes (friendly and otherwise) do not miss my children.

In addition to the the race factor is the issue of adoption. This place is about bloodlines. I am excluded from insider-ship because I “married in” eleven years ago. A guy a couple cottages over commented that he was still raising his “originals” (children); he wasn’t down to “copies” (grandchildren) yet.

From family members I’ve been asked repeatedly about the mark on Teri’s forehead. (She fell and scraped her head while I was in Chicago; the scrape is healed, but the color is still coming back.) I’ve found myself in the position of explaining how everyone’s skin first heals back the same basic (light pink) color; then the darker your skin, the longer it takes for all the melanin to return your skin to its natural color.

A family member asked my husband about Teri’s hair. When my husband replied that it is very fine, similar in thickness to Gretel’s (straight, blonde) hair, this family member said, “So it doesn’t feel like a Brillo pad?” Good thing I was with a couple of the kids half the playground away.

I’ve been part of this family since 1994. So I started asking family members younger than 60, “Do you remember there ever being any people of color here?” The only person anyone could come up with was the Black minister who married an aunt here a few years back. I asked this question to someone over breakfast this morning, and I received a surprising answer. She said, “Well, is this any different than where you grew up?”

Definitely yes.

The conversation continued and the gist of it was, didn’t we all grow up, go to school, and now live in all-White, non-integrated communities? (The undertone seemed to be–and why would we want it any different?)

The questions about skin healing and hair texture made me realize that these family members (and friends who have asked similar questions in the past) have no experience with brown-skinned or kinky-haired people. They have not had a close friend of color, a boyfriend, girlfriend, roommate, neighbor, babysitter–nobody. Their lives are not racially integrated.

Last fall, a friend of ours (three cottages down) married a man with Asian American heritage. And though this is not my style of living or thinking, I like the concept of having our children here. I have on my Loving Day shirt today (I’m really pining for a “Got Privilege?” tee). As time goes on I see how very important it is to continue celebrating landmarks like the Loving Decision, and to keep talking about Alabama’s (unenforceable) law prohibiting interracial marriage, that was still on the books until 2000.

Just two years later, the birth of our first child officially integrated ‘The Lake’. Welcome to the multiracial world, y’all.