The Skin I’m In

Here’s the thing about brown skin. It can convey a million varied tales with scarcely a change in hue. My complexion contains a mystery of where I’m from, where my people are from, how much sun I’ve endured. If you hadn’t seen me from Easter one year to the following New Year’s Day, you’d have no way of knowing that my summer was ablaze, a relentless sun toasting my skin. With the first fall of winter, frost setting up, red undertones begin to shine through. Still there is a bottom to my brown, a ceiling on how black I get each year.

My sister and I grew up in a quiet little corner of CT. With time, we cultivated our respective sets of friends, our zones of comfort. Early on, the color of our skin was of little consequence. As people of color, our collective numbered too few to be threatening–flakes of pepper resting in a teeming mound of sugar, cat whiskers drowning in a bowl of milk. The little bit of solidarity we amassed among those adorned in related shades of brown barely drew passing interest. That’s before the lot of us turned fourteen or fifteen, the lure to couple, to pair off with somebody pricking our young minds. Then our color became of grave concern.

Home was our sanctuary. The nearest branch of our family tree is rooted on either side in Harlem. My sister and I went from standing out in one place to finding on visits to New York new ways to relate: double-dutch and hair braids, ball games of all sorts played on an endless expanse of concrete. Grownups and old folks encountered in the lobby of our grandparents’ building considered us mannerly, deemed our complexion rich. Those roots helped to sustain us, connection to our life’s blood boldly rejuvenated with each passing remark. Roots that extend far south (ostensibly West African), West Indian, Blackfoot Indian–undoubtedly European as well given the rough hand colonization played in anchoring a long history of gradation across the globe.

I went south for college, attended an HBCU, its heritage steeped in the color of my skin. Surrounded by faces that resembled mine, I could no longer rely on my color to make my mark, being labeled the smart black kid in class no longer providing sufficient distinction to hang my ambitions on. I applied myself like never before, my worth cemented in the potential I saw reflected in faces that could easily have been my face.

Today, the cycle repeats itself. My progeny embody the whiskers in a new bowl of milk, roots of their tree extending to include yet another of New York’s fine boroughs–Brooklyn, a separate string of Caribbean islands, Lucayan-Arawak on top of Blackfoot Indian, a quick brush through the Middle East. Let’s hope the affiliation is enough to sustain them.

So ask me again: Where am I from? Where are my people from? How long have I stood in the sun?