On Making a Video: "Free, White and 21"

My mother passed away in the summer of 1991, and in the painful sifting through of her things I have found pictures of her from the 1920s and discovered information about my family history, which has expanded my knowledge about who she was and how it affected my own experience. I found that she had attended white schools as the only black student, because her birth certificate said she was white, as did the birth certificates of her brothers and sisters. I cannot imagine the pain that she went through, the harassments and the taunts. She was deeply affected and scarred by it. I remember her stories about being the only black student in her class at Ohio State University and it being illegal for her to live in the dorm. It was illegal for people of color to use public facilities as well as public libraries. People would become impatient and aggressive if you even brought this issue up. It was always for their comfort to keep others down. Her harsh experiences reflected the tragedy that many families suffered in the aftermath of slavery. Many families were of very mixed race as a result of the massive sexual assault (as well torture and lynching) of the men, women, and children by the Europeans and their ancestors who had kidnapped Africans and held them hostage as slaves. I found on my father’s side that one of my relatives had been blinded by the lash of one of the enslaver’s whips. The history behind the rainbow of faces in my family on both sides led to many confusions. My mother’s face—a deep, rich brown—is my face. Coffee with cream, which was my aunt’s face, looked white. We would enter stores in Ohio in the 1950s and everyone would stare at us and I would panic. For years, I could not bear to look into a mirror. There were no positive images of my people in the media or magazines unless we favored European features; we were portrayed stereotypically to make others laugh, to make them comfortable and safe. Parts of the family passed and disappeared in Oklahoma. I recently found that my grandfather’s people were from Honduras. (I discovered this only after my mother passed away.) I have so many ancestral roots that l do not know where to start. Some of the family is very, very conservative, and I am the outspoken one. Fear, I feel, motivates their silence, as the climate has become increasingly hostile, like the days when I grew up in a segregated city.