Brownish
On the flight from O’Hare to San Francisco, an elderly Indian couple next to me takes selfies on an iPad. Passengers walking down the aisle to find their seats appear to think that we’re a family, traveling together, perhaps even straight out of India since the woman is wearing a traditional sari and the couple is speaking Hindi and I am not speaking; we keep getting smiles and cocked heads of approval. These boarding passengers look at us as if saying How lovely, a nice Indian family is traveling together, and I smiled at them, I do not think they are terrorists; I am not a racist. The Indian couple is traveling to San Francisco for a wedding—I know this not because they told me, but because I observe the woman from behind the pages of novel I am pretending to read. She accepts and declines various invitations on a very full and high-tech e-calendar, and with the flick of a red-varnished fingernail, attached to a finger weighted by stacked gold rings, she accepts an e-vite to a beachfront wedding that was to take place that weekend. I know the couple has a daughter my age, in her twenties—not because they told me; we didn’t speak once, because I try to avoid engaging in conversations with strangers on planes—but because of the family photo that served as the iPad’s background.
To be a young, brown child living on Arizona’s southernmost border means that to teachers, cashiers at grocery stores, and school bus drivers, you are Hispanic. Mothers would approach me on the sidewalk and ask me questions or try to introduce me to their Spanish-speaking children, but all I could do was respond with the few phrases I remembered from my Teddy Berlitz Jr. books. Mi casa es tu casa! and Mi hermano se llama Pedro! I’d say, as vendors pushed carts of cold paletas michoacanas down the Nogales sidewalk. Frustrated, these mothers would glare at my mother and hiss Por qué no has enseñado Español?—Why haven’t you taught her Spanish? But before I could ask my mother for a popsicle, or she could open her mouth to explain that I wasn’t Hispanic, the mothers and the vendors would be gone.
Are you black or are you white? my fourth-grade Southeast Arkansas peers would ask me while swinging on monkey bars, while standing in line at the cafeteria waiting for mashed potatoes and fried chicken, from between stalls when we were in the restroom. Neither, I’d reply, My mom is white and my dad is from India. Yeah, but are you black or are you white? they’d respond. We had maybe two Hispanic kids in our fourth-grade class, but their identity was never questioned, perhaps because their parents owned the only Mexican restaurant in town and my classmates equated them with burritos and cheese dip and mariachi bands that played songs for you on your birthday. There was one other Indian girl in my class; her last name was Patel and her parents ran the Days Inn, but she was 100% Indian and there was nothing ambiguous about her ethnicity. She had grown up with these classmates since preschool, so she was never questioned.
My peers’ confusion wasn’t alleviated by the fact that Melvin, my African American bus driver, would always call me “daughter,” on the bus, would bring me birthday presents and give me hugs in the hallways. He was very friendly to all the kids on the bus, but for some reason took a particular interest in me—perhaps because I was being raised by a single mother, perhaps because I was very quiet and sat at the front of the bus, perhaps because I was brownish and maybe he, too, thought that I was black. Every day when I would get off the bus, Melvin would pat my back or touch my hand, or if he ran into me in the hallways at school or at Walmart, where he worked a second job, he would give me a hug so warm and comforting that the lines between father and bus driver would start to blur.
Without asking me, everyone at school accepted the fact that Melvin was my father, and that even though I kept saying I had a father from India, I was wrong; Melvin was my father and therefore I was black. During class, Rashada who sat behind me would play with my hair. She’d braid it, brush it, and say How’d you get this soft white-person hair? while our teacher stood at the front of the classroom, trying to get us interested in isosceles triangles and The Constitution of the United States.
We’ve never heard of India, kids would hiss at me as we were waiting for the bus. Where’s that? You mean Indiana? My father lived in Wisconsin, a place they had heard of, but because they had never met him, my peers questioned his existence. At recess, we’d gather in a circle beneath the slides, roll up our shirtsleeves, and compare skin tones. You’re almost as dark as Rashada! Sarah would say about my summertime tan. You must be black! Look how much darker you are than me! Before moving to Arkansas, I had never participated in so many wrist-skin-tone-checks—a recess activity that seemed eerily like something that young Nazi children would take joy in during their own recesses. The constant racial scrutinizing eventually made me start to wonder if I was black. Clearly, my wrist was at least ten shades darker than Sarah’s, but only two shades lighter than Rashada’s. Maybe this whole India story was a lie, maybe my father really was black, or maybe he wasn’t my father, maybe my real father really was Melvin—my fourth-grade self easily equated love to gifts, and if Melvin wasn’t my father, why would he buy me so many stuffed animals, EasyBake ovens, and gift certificates?
Around Thanksgiving break, my father flew down and spoke with my fourth-grade teacher. They arranged a day that he could come talk to the class and convince my peers of India’s existence. I was a very soft-spoken, shy child and I hated being in the spotlight. My teacher asked me to introduce my dad to the class, so I stood in front of my classmates, mumbled, This is my dad…uh, yeah and then sat back down in my desk. Even though I hated the constant questioning and pestering about my race, I was even warier of a whole class session devoted to discussing me and my ethnicity. During the class, my father passed around photos of India. He held up a few of my glimmering baby outfits, and I shrunk down in my seat while my friends giggled. They asked about the food with a genuine curiosity, and my father told them about tame dals, spicy curries, coconut chutneys, sambar, chutneys, biryani, papadums and idiyappams while my peers kept glancing at me, imagining me eating these foods with my fingers. I slunk down farther in my seat and wished myself out of the room, out of the state, out of the country and into my Ammamma’s kitchen in Kerala, eating idiyappams and curries at her dining room table, away from the scrutiny and quizzical glances. By the end of the session, I was eye-level with my desktop, but my peers were finally convinced of India’s existence.
They stopped asking me about my race afterwards, and I became just another student. It wasn’t until middle school, when people started dating, that my race was brought up again. One day when I was in seventh grade my class was lined up outside, waiting to enter the portable trailer-shack that served as our “reading classroom.” The trailer shack was always hot, the metal siding burned our fingers if we accidentally touched the building anytime between the months of May and October, and the inside smelled of must because of a hole in the ceiling where water dripped through into a plastic bucket when it rained. Ten beanbags that were supposed to accommodate the twenty-four students lined the perimeter of the room. Anyone who didn’t race to a beanbag had to sit on the hard linoleum floor. Nothing about the atmosphere of the reading room made us want to take any interest in reading.
As we waited to enter, we chatted about the upcoming winter dance and who we wanted to go with. One of my friends, Chelsea, said You’re so lucky, Ania, because you can go with a black guy or a white guy! I have to go with a white guy, or my dad would be furious. After that, I started to wonder why I didn’t have a date, when I was supposedly so versatile, while many of my friends already had dates. Many of the students at Monticello Middle School viewed their peers who were “mixed” as if we were from some untouchable caste, some sinful she-thing. Black guys wouldn’t date half-white girls, white guys wouldn’t touch half-black girls; their hate bred a constant circularity of isolation and loneliness. If Chelsea’s father would be furious about her bringing a black guy home, why would any of my classmates’ parents want them to bring a half-Indian girl home?
If an outsider were to walk into our middle school cafeteria, they’d think we had just recently gone through desegregation. A table of black jocks and cheerleaders sat in one corner, a table of white jocks and cheerleaders in another; a table of white guys who were on their way to becoming the “redneck” clique in high school sat at one table, a table of black guys who would soon become the “gangster” clique sat at another. By that time, I was sitting at a predominately white-girl table—friends made during band practices, or via my mom introducing me to her colleagues’ daughters. In classes, everyone would chat and joke with everyone else, but in the cafeteria, where the students were given freedom and the choice to choose where to sit, they segregated instantly. No longer did the white basketball player flirt with the black cheerleader. They might text each other from phones hidden beneath the cafeteria tables, but they remained on opposite sides of the room. Their romance became a thing for privacy, for secret after-school meetings or stolen kisses shared between shadows cast over a dark movie theater.
By freshman year of high school, my Indian friend, the Patel girl, had left our clique and started befriending the “hot black girl” clique instead. None of the white guys had showed any interest in dating her, but once she moved to the hot-black clique, she had dates every week. I remember my father once asking me about her on the phone, and when I told her that she wasn’t hanging out with us anymore, she was hanging out with the black kids, he said, Her parents must be disappointed. I don’t know if her parents were disappointed or not, but I do know that I’m not allowed to bring a man to visit my family in India until I’m married; I do know that my father’s side of the family was not happy when he went off to America and had a child with a white woman who he never married, but I’m not sure how this situation would be different if he had run off to America to have a child with a black woman who he never married.
Which cliques we hung out with, where we ate our lunch in the cafeteria, which seat we chose on the bus or which corner of the parking lot we parked our cars in established who we would talk to, who we would date, what types of activities we would be willing to engage in on the weekends—our lives were determined by a series of subtle cues, lunch tray and vehicle placements. I’m assuming that up until a certain point, many of these indicators that we chose—right corner of the cafeteria, back of the bus—might have been heavily influenced by our parents’ expectations. By our senior year of high school, many more couples were dating interracially—but that was only after twelve years of growing up together.
In college, when I went on family vacations to Italy, Belize, or Greece, I had little trouble passing as a local, assuming that I was not dressed like a tourist. Once, when my mother and I were purchasing a baguette at a bakery in Rome, the baker ignored my mother, turned to me and started addressing me in Italian. A woman on a ferry in Greece once handed me her baby and gave me instructions to care for it in Greek. My college friends would often tell me how lucky I am that I can pass for so many different races, but to me, it still feels like a hindrance, a lie, even—what good is it to look Italian, but not be able to speak one word of Italian? To look ambiguously brown but being capable of only speaking English sets me up for a lifetime of disappointing strangers. The pressure is enough to make me want to learn twelve different languages—yes, see, I can fit in with your culture, I do belong here, in Greece, you were right to look at me and assume so!
Once, during grad school, I sat in a YMCA sauna at Marquette, Michigan. A man in his 60s, whom I had never met before, looked at me for a few seconds, then asked Are you Brazilian? I responded, No, to which he responded Well, are you Portuguese? Italian? Mexican? To which I responded No, no, no. Another man in the sauna actually got off of his bench, walked over, leaned in and squinted his eyes at me, peering as if I were an animal at a zoo. I’d bet you’re Venezuelan, he said, But I could tell better if I had my glasses on. It was like they were playing some version of racial Jeopardy!, where the contestants are stuck together in a 10 foot by 7 foot wooden box, vulnerable and wearing minimal clothing, streams of sweat pouring from their pores as they try to guess my race, the $100,000 stinger in the final round.
When I finally told them the cocktail of my genealogy, the are-you-Brazilian man responded, Mixed babies always have it better. They’re usually better looking and smarter. I wondered if he’d spent two seconds asking his half-Brazilian children about life in Marquette, Michigan—the whitest and least racially-diverse area of the country that I’ve ever lived in. Here, I walk into a room and I am instantly the darkest-skinned person. I am almost entirely sure that a high school cafeteria here would look nothing like the one at my high school—instead, it would be made up of students who bear various shades of blondeness, brunetteness, redness—the students haven’t even had a chance to chose whether to segregate or not.
When people ask me what race I am—and this happens very frequently in the YMCA sauna—it’s difficult not to snap at them, even though I know that most of the time, they are simply asking out of curiosity. I don’t ask them where all their hair went, or why the pinky on their right hand is so crooked, why they have seven moles on their neck, or whether they are Russian or Polish or Icelandic, or maybe even Greek. Perhaps it is because I’ve lived my whole life being asked this question, but I would never say to a perfect stranger, Hi, my name’s Ania, what’s yours, have you seen that new Tom Hanks movie, oh, and what race are you? I might wonder to myself, quietly, and try to gather any clues that I could without directly asking the person, via techniques like peering onto the screen of the iPad of the Indian couple who sat next to me on the plane (I was merely curious about their lives), but halfway through the flight, they darkened the brightness of the screen and turned away from me, so that I couldn’t see the iPad anymore and I had nothing to do but listen to my own music and read my own novel, every so often looking out the window and seeing the dark ponds and rows of boxy houses below.
Ania Payne lives in Manhattan, Kansas, with her husband, Great Dane, Husky, 2 tiger cats, and 2 backyard chickens. She teaches in the English Department at Kansas State University and has an MFA in creative nonfiction. She is the author of the chapbook Karma Animalia. She has previously been published in Bending Genres, The Rush, Panorama: The Journal of Intelligent Travel, Whiskey Island, The Rumpus, and elsewhere.
