Moving Forward From the In-Between
Getting to know my father has felt like untying a series of twisted little knots. It’s required sifting through his words to get down to their real meaning, examining his stories within the context of the environment in which he was raised, and relishing small realizations gained from conversations with family and friends about him. It’s involved juggling both the hypocritical hatred and unconditional adoration one reserves for parents. My father has not made it easy to get to know him, beneath his facade. But sometimes, I suppose, neither have I.
To know my father’s parents is not to know him, just as to know my father is not to know me. But to know of them is to provide context for some of his personality traits, some of his behaviors. My grandmother is a small, white, German woman who fled from a tiny town in Germany during World War II and lost her twin brother before we, the extended family in America, could get to know him. She is a no-nonsense, loving, complicated woman of her time. As a very young woman, she left everything she had in Germany to join my grandfather, the love of her life, and raise children in the United States.
My grandfather, who died of cancer when I was nine, before I had the opportunity to understand him with any depth, was a light-skinned black man, with Southern roots. His voice and his laugh were soft like butter, buty the depth of his experience indecipherable and mysterious like a foreign language. He was a war veteran with past lives and multiple marriages, yet my grandmother (his only white wife) was the one with whom he stayed, raising mixed-race children in the United States in the 1960s. My grandparents remained together, laughing and strong, until the day he died.
As a child, my dad spoke fluent German, had a huge afro, tan skin, and big glasses. The family moved around frequently to keep up with the military’s demands of my grandfather. My dad stuck out no matter where he went. He hated it intensely and longed for obscurity. He tells painful stories of rejection from both black and white communities, of cruelty on all sides. In a world designed to spurn him, my father sought somewhere in which to fit. He chose to chase whiteness.
When my father was a preteen, he and his family moved to Maryland, into a white clapboard house surrounded by large apple trees and a garden encircled by a tall chainlink fence. Shortly after they arrived, faceless neighbors placed a burning cross in their front yard. It was a warning that marriages and families like theirs were not welcome, but my father and his family ignored it. My grandfather died in a hospital bed in that house. I helped my grandmother garden under the apple trees. For years, my dogs ran wild through the clover leaves in the backyard. I have heard other stories of the ways my dad’s family was discriminated against in that town, little wisps of information boiled down to suit an impressionable little girl who knew nothing of all that she represented.
In all the years I tried to psychologically analyze my father, I’ve come to the conclusion that the reason he so vehemently rejected the black community early on was because he labeled it as a barrier to his way forward. Rather than seeing it as a different path to the American Dream, my father sees black culture as its own worst enemy — the fault of black people not wanting the right things or trying hard enough to get them. What do parents give to us, if not everything they have, good and bad, all at once? My father passed down many things to me, beautiful things: an eager interest in whales and the ocean, a love for adventure and intrigue and learning. But he also passed down uncertainty, a tendency to deny confrontation in an effort to assimilate, an adept ability to hide in plain sight. When I was a child, my father carried me around his world like a little charm — I was calm and quiet and easy, the physical creation and manifestation of his ability to keep existing, despite the world’s best efforts to stop him.
When my father and I were together, we spent it away from his siblings and their children, my cousins. Every Thanksgiving, we travelled with my stepmother to see her family in Syracuse, New York, hours away from both my black and white biological families. By association, he and I became immersed in traditions of whiteness demonstrated by my stepmom’s white family and my dad’s white friends. I can best describe these traditions in abstract images, like owning multiple car dealerships or being an established female author in Annapolis or taking cycling classes or sweating happily during Bikram yoga. I had been growing up through private Catholic school in a stringently segregated town, so I fit neatly the mold of a dutiful American daughter in my dad’s chosen, white circles.
When I did spend time with my father’s dark-skinned, first-born half-siblings in Texas, it was most often without him there at all. It wasn’t that he hated them, it was simply that he never mentioned them, positively or negatively. At the time, I was too young to understand that eventually I would desperately want to be familiar with them, if only to understand a different way of life.
My father talks distantly of his relatives as if he can’t really understand where they should exist in his life. Today, I have a detached understanding of my dad’s self-identified space in that side of the family. To me, he exists on a strange, lonely offshoot of my family tree, all on his own.
My dad was my only link to brownness; being around him made me feel like my brown skin occurred naturally. And yet, an identity based in our brownness was not something that he and I shared. Ironically, he was the one to make me understand for the first time the necessity of hiding what separated me from whiteness. He emphasized the necessity of chopping this identity up into pieces easy enough for others to digest without spitting me out. The things I learned about accepting blackness and brownness for their differences, I did not learn from him.
As I get to know these relatives in my adulthood, I realize how little they remind me of him. Unlike my father, they embrace individuality, balk against prohibitive societal norms, never encourage me to chase money in order to attain success. More than that though, they talk to me about our family’s history in a way that shows they are not embarrassed to acknowledge where they came from. They are open and honest, they give me the opportunity to understand the world for myself in order to better identify my place in it. They are not perfect, but they are willing to put their own identity politics aside and help me as I try to understand mine.
Sometimes people talk about the immorality of creating mixed-race children, and speak of us a class of people who, because we exist at such a tumultuous intersection of cultures, having no culture or identity of our own. Accusations like this hurt, because yes, sometimes I do feel, vividly, like someone without a culture to call home.
But what hurts more is not being considered at all. I know that I am black, and that I am white. I know that I am both and neither of these things, all at the same time. It is an individual experience. Beautiful. Painful. Different. It took me so much longer to understand this without my father there to help me, or even to point me to others who could.
I don’t hate my father. Sometimes I say that I do, but I don’t. Sometimes, I understand him better than I understand anyone else. I know exactly why he had to choose. And, though I do not think my choices would have been the same had I been in his shoes; I understand his desperate need for hope and why he held tightly onto visions of possibility. I wish my father could recognize all the beauty and prospect of blackness the way he believes in the beauty and prospect of whiteness. But that is not my realization to make.
My dad is alive, and he is well, and he is strong, with years ahead of him. I only hope that these years bring him peace. With so many mixed-race people out there to share their stories, the wealth of experience on which to draw only grows each day. The difference between my father and I is that I choose to move myself and my openness for new identity forward. I choose to be there for others in ways I wish he had been there for me, to pursue a version of the future in which I have done all that I can to make the world a more caring and understanding place.
To know my father’s parents is not to know him, just as to know my father is not to know me. But to know of them is to provide context for some of his personality traits, some of his behaviors. My grandmother is a small, white, German woman who fled from a tiny town in Germany during World War II and lost her twin brother before we, the extended family in America, could get to know him. She is a no-nonsense, loving, complicated woman of her time. As a very young woman, she left everything she had in Germany to join my grandfather, the love of her life, and raise children in the United States.
My grandfather, who died of cancer when I was nine, before I had the opportunity to understand him with any depth, was a light-skinned black man, with Southern roots. His voice and his laugh were soft like butter, buty the depth of his experience indecipherable and mysterious like a foreign language. He was a war veteran with past lives and multiple marriages, yet my grandmother (his only white wife) was the one with whom he stayed, raising mixed-race children in the United States in the 1960s. My grandparents remained together, laughing and strong, until the day he died.
As a child, my dad spoke fluent German, had a huge afro, tan skin, and big glasses. The family moved around frequently to keep up with the military’s demands of my grandfather. My dad stuck out no matter where he went. He hated it intensely and longed for obscurity. He tells painful stories of rejection from both black and white communities, of cruelty on all sides. In a world designed to spurn him, my father sought somewhere in which to fit. He chose to chase whiteness.
When my father was a preteen, he and his family moved to Maryland, into a white clapboard house surrounded by large apple trees and a garden encircled by a tall chainlink fence. Shortly after they arrived, faceless neighbors placed a burning cross in their front yard. It was a warning that marriages and families like theirs were not welcome, but my father and his family ignored it. My grandfather died in a hospital bed in that house. I helped my grandmother garden under the apple trees. For years, my dogs ran wild through the clover leaves in the backyard. I have heard other stories of the ways my dad’s family was discriminated against in that town, little wisps of information boiled down to suit an impressionable little girl who knew nothing of all that she represented.
In all the years I tried to psychologically analyze my father, I’ve come to the conclusion that the reason he so vehemently rejected the black community early on was because he labeled it as a barrier to his way forward. Rather than seeing it as a different path to the American Dream, my father sees black culture as its own worst enemy — the fault of black people not wanting the right things or trying hard enough to get them. What do parents give to us, if not everything they have, good and bad, all at once? My father passed down many things to me, beautiful things: an eager interest in whales and the ocean, a love for adventure and intrigue and learning. But he also passed down uncertainty, a tendency to deny confrontation in an effort to assimilate, an adept ability to hide in plain sight. When I was a child, my father carried me around his world like a little charm — I was calm and quiet and easy, the physical creation and manifestation of his ability to keep existing, despite the world’s best efforts to stop him.
When my father and I were together, we spent it away from his siblings and their children, my cousins. Every Thanksgiving, we travelled with my stepmother to see her family in Syracuse, New York, hours away from both my black and white biological families. By association, he and I became immersed in traditions of whiteness demonstrated by my stepmom’s white family and my dad’s white friends. I can best describe these traditions in abstract images, like owning multiple car dealerships or being an established female author in Annapolis or taking cycling classes or sweating happily during Bikram yoga. I had been growing up through private Catholic school in a stringently segregated town, so I fit neatly the mold of a dutiful American daughter in my dad’s chosen, white circles.
When I did spend time with my father’s dark-skinned, first-born half-siblings in Texas, it was most often without him there at all. It wasn’t that he hated them, it was simply that he never mentioned them, positively or negatively. At the time, I was too young to understand that eventually I would desperately want to be familiar with them, if only to understand a different way of life.
My father talks distantly of his relatives as if he can’t really understand where they should exist in his life. Today, I have a detached understanding of my dad’s self-identified space in that side of the family. To me, he exists on a strange, lonely offshoot of my family tree, all on his own.
My dad was my only link to brownness; being around him made me feel like my brown skin occurred naturally. And yet, an identity based in our brownness was not something that he and I shared. Ironically, he was the one to make me understand for the first time the necessity of hiding what separated me from whiteness. He emphasized the necessity of chopping this identity up into pieces easy enough for others to digest without spitting me out. The things I learned about accepting blackness and brownness for their differences, I did not learn from him.
As I get to know these relatives in my adulthood, I realize how little they remind me of him. Unlike my father, they embrace individuality, balk against prohibitive societal norms, never encourage me to chase money in order to attain success. More than that though, they talk to me about our family’s history in a way that shows they are not embarrassed to acknowledge where they came from. They are open and honest, they give me the opportunity to understand the world for myself in order to better identify my place in it. They are not perfect, but they are willing to put their own identity politics aside and help me as I try to understand mine.
Sometimes people talk about the immorality of creating mixed-race children, and speak of us a class of people who, because we exist at such a tumultuous intersection of cultures, having no culture or identity of our own. Accusations like this hurt, because yes, sometimes I do feel, vividly, like someone without a culture to call home.
But what hurts more is not being considered at all. I know that I am black, and that I am white. I know that I am both and neither of these things, all at the same time. It is an individual experience. Beautiful. Painful. Different. It took me so much longer to understand this without my father there to help me, or even to point me to others who could.
I don’t hate my father. Sometimes I say that I do, but I don’t. Sometimes, I understand him better than I understand anyone else. I know exactly why he had to choose. And, though I do not think my choices would have been the same had I been in his shoes; I understand his desperate need for hope and why he held tightly onto visions of possibility. I wish my father could recognize all the beauty and prospect of blackness the way he believes in the beauty and prospect of whiteness. But that is not my realization to make.
My dad is alive, and he is well, and he is strong, with years ahead of him. I only hope that these years bring him peace. With so many mixed-race people out there to share their stories, the wealth of experience on which to draw only grows each day. The difference between my father and I is that I choose to move myself and my openness for new identity forward. I choose to be there for others in ways I wish he had been there for me, to pursue a version of the future in which I have done all that I can to make the world a more caring and understanding place.
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