Among Others - Lois Griffith - Hardcover

I am indigo with some henna in me. My skin is smooth and soft and glows with even color. I don't know how I got this way. My mother and father and sister were much lighter. Warm cinnamon. But I came out dark. Behind my back I've heard people say: she's black, but she's a pretty girl--as if being black and being pretty exclude each other. But I've come to realize none of what's happened would have been any different. Even if I'd been cream-colored high yellow, people still would have tried to make me feel bad about my dark self. Some old blurred picture in my head. A trip in a bus to the market in Bridgetown. The rocking motion of the bus. The cane tall and sweet smelling in the fields that bordered the road. Getting off the bus. The noise and the crowd in the market. My mother talking and laughing. Pulling me along to make my baby steps keep stride with some fellow she strolled with in the market. The market was crowded with feet. The hems of shirts. Bright-colored cotton. The soft twill of pant legs. Lean-to stalls. The sun high overhead. Mats on the ground. Vegetables and spices. Women sitting cross-legged under canvas awnings. Busy hands at basket weave. Things to eat. Things to wear. Everywhere color. Someone with a tin pan and the syncopation of calypso. A bag of coconut sweets thrust into my face. A dark hand under my chin to look in my face. A man's deep voice to my mother: "Put a hat on the child so she don't burn blacker than she is already." Words between my mother and a man I think was my father were tossed above my head and melted in the sun. My mother kept a firm grip on my wrist so I wouldn't wander off. Her other hand held in the hand of the man. My fascination with our hands. The contrast of my dark little hand in theirs. My mother Lorraine doesn't believe I remember the first two years of my life, but I do. The island where I was born. Something about the way the light cut through the fronds of the tall coconut palms and fell in patterns on the ground. Mottled patterns of light on my baby feet. A yard with chickens and a goat. That yard was my world. The goat worrying my neck and arms with its soft lips. At night there was the burning smell of citronella when mosquitoes were on the attack. My mother and father had two daughters: me and my sister Ruby. I was the oldest and the darkest and I didn't look like any of them. My parents were never legally married. The two of them had grown up together. Soon after I was born my father Duncan left the island and came to the States. He left my mother and me and later we followed him here. We should have stayed on the island. I know if we had stayed, I would be an island girl, maybe with other dark brothers and sisters like me. But my mother came to the States from Barbados in 1951. She tells the story of coming in a freighter with two suitcases and me, her toddling baby-girl. We were going to make a new life. Duncan and his brother came to the States, rented an old garage on Pacific Street in Brooklyn, New York, and went into the business of fixing cars. They were strong, hardworking men. "Your father and I always tried to be clear with each other," Lorraine said. "I was going to take care of myself and you. I never asked him for anything." When she came to the States she did day work for some nice white people, then she got pregnant with my sister. My father was proud. He teased her about her being a nigger girl with a big belly who cleaned toilets. When my sister Ruby came into the world I was three. She looked like my mother and father and belonged to them. I felt like I was outside their circle. "You imagined things," Lorraine insisted. I was seven or eight when I clearly saw my place in our family. Once my sister and I were fighting--growing up, we were always at each other--I caught her on my side of the room we shared. I told her I had takenGriffith, Lois is the author of 'Among Others - Lois Griffith - Hardcover' with ISBN 9780517703670 and ISBN 051770367X.