Because at times I do feel like a fly in buttermilk. I love my new home, but sometimes I feel out of place. I've had to learn some things to adapt. But I love it here. I love the land, I love the quiet, and I love the people I've come to know. But I'm still a rarity as a black person. I kind of feel like doing this, when I see another one, but that would just be weird.
Like seriously. I'm curious. And if it weren't so outlandish, I'd go compare notes.
Soooo....how did you come to be out here?
Do you like it?
Are the locals kind to you?
Stuff like that. I'm hoping they'd have an experience similar to mine, where most of the people I meet are just warm. I'm not one of those people who believes that sinister white supremacy exists under every single smile. I pride myself on being a good judge of character, and believe me, I know who likes me and who doesn't. I know who can see past my appearance and who can't. I just keep that poker face, and go on about my business.
Onto the albino part...
This is picking fun at all of the people within the black community who have thought that my light skin is some sort of Get out of Oppression Free card. Like they weren't dealing it to me themselves, in a way (touch on that in another blog). I've been called white by black people so many damned times....it's funny now. I don't even take offense, because half of you are just joking, and the other half of you are fucking stupid, and stupid people amuse me.
Buttermilk?
Well...I live in a place that's almost 89% white. I grew up in an all white neighborhood, so this doesn't bother me. I was oblivious as a child to what my mother went through, growing up during Jim crow. Growing up, I did not understand her efforts to replace my Sweet Valley whatever incarnation I was reading with James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, or Maya Angelou. I learned to love these authors, but I was too young to understand why I should (tender age of twelve, to begin with). These books just captured me. I didn't realize back then that folks actually lived these things. So, needless to say, I'm not largely uncomfortable living out here where I do. To be honest, I love it. I enjoy my neighbors, the people I see at church, the new people I meet...most of them. There have been hiccups in the Matrix...
The past several weeks have introduced me to disillusionment, and I thought I was done with that for a while. But that's my stupidity, for jumping off the cliff of Common Sense. I tend not to listen to caution or reason when I set my mind on doing something. So...for a minute I felt overwhelmed by, well...the whiteness out here. When you're enrolling your son in school and some woman is just glaring at you for no reason as you drive off, when folks gawp at you in the store, when folks are hesitant to approach you (I'm largely harmless, I swear....well...okay I'm lying), these things rankle.
But I didn't come this far and have the blessings that I have, in the form of the people I know and love here, to turn tail and run. I'm here for a reason that extends past my choices.
I'm the type who refuses to lament her past, because I'm so in love with (most aspects of) my present. I love my intended, I love his family, I love this place, and I would not be here if it weren't for every single disappointment I've endured thus far. You know, all that stuff about setbacks being setups for comebacks and shit.
I am one of the flies in the buttermilk out here. We're here...it's just hard to see us because this place is so big. And I'm even harder to see because of my cafe au lait complexion. Well, not really.
I'm deluding myself. You look at me, you know I'm black. But that's not all I am.
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