“Youth is a perpetual intoxication; it is a fever of the mind.” ~François Duc de la Rochefoucauld
When I was about 12 or 13, I ‘worked’ as a CIT at a day camp, primarily with a group of younger children aged five and under. During the evenings though, while waiting for parents, to arrive, we’d all sit on the playground. Hot and sweaty and drained from being in the sun all day long. One evening I was standing aside a play structure when one of the kids – a boy, about six who was small for his age, thus garnering attention from every adult within 10 miles, who of course excused much of his behavior – looked at me and the counselor standing with us and in all seriousness asked “Why is she so dark?”
He asked it to the counselor as if I wasn’t standing there and for the life of me, her answer hasn’t been retained as well as that initial wave of shock that came over me. Like being punched in the gut but by someone you couldn’t punch back. He was a child and she answered as best as possible something about how some people look different than others. And I was too busy standing there like an idiot with a buzz in my ears and unsure of what to say.
I wasn’t 23. I was 13. I couldn’t come up with a comprehensible explanation for a six year old because I was too busy being horrifically offended and young enough to still have been spared from people saying far worse. Young enough to not know the difference between general interest from a child as to the color of one’s skin and a crude adult. So instead of being able to answer with use of the word ‘melanin’ and ‘the only thing I could do was to feel hurt and frankly stupid. But worst of all incredibly different. Which at 13, as a female, there’s enough going on what with sudden growth of these things on your upper body and hair and what the fuck one does with a pink thing with sharp blades and well the advent of ‘Aunt Flo’; there’s just enough. There’s no need to say P.S. you’re black and you people notice. EVERY SINGLE DAY.
Children say things and notice particular things as they get older, which is unexpected. I’ve aged 10 whole years and yet there’s still a part of me that flinches when a child I’m babysitting, under the age of 10 says “I have a question.” It’s like the 13 year old inside of me thinks that the question will inevitably be the one thing that I don’t want to have to answer. Even though usually the question seems to be “How much hummus and cookies do you think I can eat before I throw up?” And that, my friends, is far easier to answer.
(inspired by this)
10 Comments
I hope that it helps you to consider that with each new generation there will be fewer 10 year olds who will have to ask that question. And PS – do you read Zadie Smith? Start with On Beauty.
Also, I totally, immediately knew what CIT meant, thanks to the Babysitter’s Club. How come I can remember that shit, but not where I left my dry cleaning ticket?
It took me an hour to find my dry cleaning ticket last week. Awesome.
Oh and thank you for giving me somewhere to use my Borders coupon.
(P.S. God, I am depressing. Next week? More Malbec or perhaps a Gewurtraminer? It’s getting warm out and we all know that more wine makes for a more quality HB)
CIT…I had forgetten about that. I also was a CIT. Why I was allowed to “care” for other peoples children at 13 I’ll never understand. I never got the skin color question growing up in Guilderland, but I did get the famous black hair questions:
Why does your hair feel like that?
If I move it, will it stay in that spot?
Do you wash your hair everyday?
etc
etc
etc.
As a child, it really can make you feel like you came from Mars.
Let’s hope that dopey kids like that are more stupidly curious about “different people” than judgmental about someone’s race, religion, or country of origin. Sadly, it’s usually the adults who make more distinctions between people, even if they keep it to themselves.
Questions from children never seemed to bother me. Adults are a different matter.
Kids can be cruel. I remember things The Scary Kids (those that lived at the top of my neighborhood and were super mean) would say to me, but I don’t remember what I ate for lunch today. Crap like that sticks with you.
It must have been terrible at the time, but I’m sure he was asking out of ignorant curiousity. Although I grew up with black friends and neighbors courtesy of a different town, my brother seven years younger did not and met his first AA friend in preschool, who asked as my mother and her father sat talking, “Hey can Tiffany come over after school? And don’t worry, she’s not dirty, her skin is just that color.”
My mother just about died. But he and Tiffany were great friends. At four they were going to be married. Of course he now plays for the other team, so no marriage there.
I lived in Jamaica for several months 2003, doing charity work in a little town called St. Ann’s Bay. It was a wonderful experience, and I fell hugely in love with the Jamaican people. After I’d been there for about three months, someone snapped a picture of me with a group of kids. Later, one of the neighborhood children was looking at the picture with me, and he said, “Hey, you’re white.” As if it had just occurred to him. I laughed. “Didn’t you know?” I asked him. He shook his head. “I forgot to notice,” he told me. “You seem too nice to be a white person.”
A finer compliment I have never received.
I hope when your children are CITs, no one asks about skin color, because I hope by that time our culture will have embraced the beauty of diversity. But if someone does ask, I know your children answer with the same grace you live every single day.
I am glad to know you.
Nowadays the kids in my class like to ask folks, “What are you mixed with?” It seems that they have embraced the whole melting pot idea and recognize that many folks have ancestors from a variety of ethnicities.
My fave question growing up was, “Why aren’t the palms of your hands dark too?”
I can’t claim to understand how it is to hear someone ask a question like that, but I can definitely vouch for how much the answer can shape someone. I will always remember my mom answering my “what does the bad kind of gay mean” with “it means that either two men or two women love each other like your dad and I love each other” and then went back to folding towels. And I’ll always be grateful that she made sure to give me the facts without introducing any sort of prejudice.