of our heritage, attitudes and behaviour are never attributed to our genetic make-up. This seems short-sighted on everyone’s part, especially as Americans are so big on understanding human nature.
I am not merely what you see. I’m the total sum of my parts, and the dominant elements aren’t necessarily the most visibly apparent ones. One morning in Paris, I realized that to come to terms with myself meant that I would have to come to terms with my ancestral past. It was 5 July 1985, the day after America’s celebration of her independence.
While growing up in Philadelphia, the first capital of the United States, had enhanced my sense of the nation’s history, I had never examined my own. As it was cautiously overlooked by everyone else, it had been easy for me to carry on as if it didn’t exist.
I enthusiastically set out to trace my family tree. I took out a library book on genealogy. Tracing my family turned out to be impossible, since slave births and deaths were not recorded and marriage was not allowed. It’s as if my great-grandparents just fell out of the sky.
While history is what is written about the past, I accept that it’s drawn from deduction, supposition and conjecture, as well as some lies and deceptions motivated by politics, money and sex. No matter. It’s good reading and great soap opera, so I’m sorry that there is no history of my ancestors to share with you.
My geographical and cultural heritage is largely American, and it’s safe to say that my great-grandparents on both sides of the family were born there. I am not sure how my grandfather’s mother came to be half German Jew or whether the man, Shouse of Danville, Kentucky, who fathered her behaved like a father. It won’t change the fact that I am in part German Jew. My grandmother says that her grandmother was a Native American, but the rest of my ancestors must have come by sea.
Some were brought over against their will from Africa, and these ancestors weren’t allowed to bring their culture or even their language with them or share in American culture at that time. They were captive labourers. I can’t comprehend how these conditions must have stunted their emotional and intellectual growth, but that was probably the least of their worries.
A baby born to an African girl raped by an Englishman was half English as well as half African, but was considered a slave. Its development was restricted to the degradations of a slave’s environment. Its Englishness would be overlooked and denied for the benefit of plantation economy. Nobody bothered to challenge this convenient deception, but wasn’t the baby equally an enslaved Englishman? In this way, a new breed was born on American soil and forcibly chained to the American dream.
People see pictures of my father’s family and ask me what race they are. When I hear myself say, ‘They’re Black,’ it sounds ludicrous, because their skin is hardly brown. Since the sixties, the Black Power movement and radical chic, Black is what Americans of slave descent are called. Before that we were called Negroes, coloured, Nigras and niggers and Lord knows what else. As kids we used to say, ‘Sticks and stones can break my bones but names can never hurt me,’ but the naming of things is important. We rely on labels to identify and categorize everything around us.
The 26 million Americans that evolved out of the sexual abuse of the slave class never got a definitive name. Black is clearly inaccurate. Our appearances vary and represent the complete spectrum of facial features, skin colours, hair textures, eye colours and physical types. Even within a nuclear family unit there are those variations. As descendants of an enslaved people we developed socially and culturally in spite of our limited privileges. We were sustained by the promise that one day we might share in the freedom and equality that was talked about so much. One day it really should suffice to call us Americans.
On that 5 July in Paris, I decided that I wouldn’t wait any longer for someone else to come up with a suitable name, and picked up the nearest dictionary. It happened to be a French/English one, a bit weather-beaten but still useful. I hoped to find a word that would describe my being of mixed descent and also suggest my African heredity.
When I stumbled upon the French word mélange, which means a mixture and also contains part of the word ‘melanin’, dark pigment found in the skin, it hit me like fireworks. Melange. I repeated it over and over out loud and in my head. I wrote it big and wrote it small and tried different endings until I heard myself saying ‘Melangian’ (pronounced mi-lan-jian with the accent on the middle syllable). It sounded right, but I wanted to get a second opinion, so I called a Melangian friend in New York to ask him if he liked it and made quite a screeching row when he did. Then I hung up the phone and put headphones on and turned up the music so loud that it nearly deafened me and danced by myself.
So let me start this again … I am Melangian. I was born of war. I am of the race which evolved out of slavery. We have a distinct cultural history, and in spite of all the shit, we’ve survived.
In the Melangian family women are particularly important because for a long time family units weren’t lawfully permitted within the slave class. (If I said that during the first thirty years of the Victorian era, working-class people were not allowed to get married, you might get the picture and a sense of how recent it was.) I come from a long line of working women. They had no choice.
My grandmother, Edna Mae Graham, who helped raise me, was raised in Florida by her grandmother, Fannie Graham, who was born a slave. There’s no photograph of Fannie, she probably never had one taken, but my grandmother described her as ‘skinny and yella’ with a crook in her nose like mine. From what I gather, she must have been a hellraiser. I wish I could remember more of what my grandmother told me about her.
Before Fannie died, her granddaughter, Edna Mae, a lean ambitious nineteen-year-old, had already hotfooted to Philadelphia, where she married a handsome friend of her family’s, Henry Robinson. Within five years they had three children, Henry Jr, Inez and Thelma, all born before the Depression. Nobody is clear about Henry senior’s line of work but, for some suspect reason, he had enough money to keep them living in certain style. Thelma, the youngest, still remembers the big house with the piano in the parlour. For a Melangian man in the 1920s that was no mean feat. Unfortunately, he took his money when he left during the Depression. Edna still managed. She had a beautician’s licence and the family made do with the money she was paid for straightening women’s hair.
I used to long to hear Edna’s stories about her Southern childhood, but she rarely talked about it or her eleven brothers and sisters. Neither they nor her grandmother who raised her were enough to draw her back to Florida. She never went home again. She never talked about her home or her family except Fannie, and if you tried to pry, she’d shut you up pretty fast by saying that there was nothing to be gained from talking about that ‘slaverytime shit’. She had a way with words and wasn’t the kind of gentle little woman you could press into a discussion that she didn’t want to have.
Once, though, she told about the time her father carried her on his shoulders to meet his regiment which fought in a war that she was never able to specify. (Considering she was born in 1896, I assume it was the small skirmish America had with Spain in 1898 over Cuba’s independence.) I don’t remember what made her break her silence, but throughout my own childhood it was the only mental image I had of hers. There are no photographs of her apart from one large portrait taken when she was nineteen. I never liked the picture in its oval frame. It made her look too much like George Washington and didn’t show that her eyes were the colour of pale sienna set against her straw complexion, which was never marred by a pimple or a rash.
Edna’s son Henry Jr finished high school and enlisted in July 1938 and by 21 October, he was assigned to a recruit training regiment at a naval training centre in Norfolk, Virginia. Edna’s two teenage daughters, Inez and Thelma, were still at high school. Both girls were pretty and popular. After graduating, they joined in the war effort with jobs at Brewster’s airplane plant. Henry was stationed at Pearl Harbor – his fleet
