Race

A personal essay

A few years ago, when I was working on the poem, “My Mother Dreams Another Country,” I was compelled to consider what my mother must have been thinking —- in 1966 —- about the biracial child she and my father were bringing into the world. The year before, my parents had broken two laws of the state of Mississippi by traveling to Ohio to marry and then returning to my mother’s home state. It was just after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, but still before the Supreme Court decision in Loving v. State of Virginia in which state anti-miscegenation laws were ruled unconstitutional. And it was years before those unconstitutional state laws were no longer enforced —- by custom, by intimidation, and by other deterrents imposed upon couples seeking marriage licenses. Barack Obama was just 5 years old when my mother was contemplating another country —- another America —- in which interracial marriage would be legal in the entire country. In 1961, when Obama was born, 21 states still had laws forbidding the marriage of his parents —- of blacks to whites.

The vestiges of those old laws still hang on in the customs and attitudes of many people in the United States. In Alabama, for example, it has been just about a decade since citizens went to the polls to vote on whether or not the anti-miscegenation law should be removed from the books. The old law was voted down by a slim margin. Nearly half of the people casting their ballots wanted to keep the law —- if only symbolically —- in order to support the antiquated notion that parents like mine shouldn’t be able to marry legally in the state, and —- by extension —- people like me, and Obama, be legally born.

Perhaps my mother, contemplating the shifting language and mores of her time, imagined the kind of psychological exile I would inherit as a native daughter of a state and a country that rendered me symbolically illegal —- an imposed “illegitimacy” underscored by the laws of the land. Perhaps, also, she worried —- as any concerned parent would —- about the kind of nation her child would inherit in which people of color, poor people, and other marginal citizens continued to be pushed to the periphery of American citizenship —- a liminal space, a country within a country, in which social justice, equal protection under the law, and equal opportunity in education, housing and health care were dreams we are as yet working as a nation to ensure for all American citizens.

Watching the election of Barack Obama to become the 44th president of the United States —- the first black person and first biracial person to hold this office —- I couldn’t help thinking of my mother, dead 23 years now. Were she here to witness this moment in American history, she might recall, as I do, lines from Langston Hughes’ famous poem “I, Too, Sing America.” She would no doubt take note of just how far we have come as a nation, reveling in the symbolic imagery of an American citizen stepping from the margins of our shared history to lead us in the continued pursuit of liberty and justice for all.

She’d also have a sober assessment of how much we have left to do.

My Mother Dreams Another Country

Already the words are changing. She is changing

from colored to negro, black still years ahead.

This is 1966 —- she is married to a white man —-

and there are more names for what grows inside her.

It is enough to worry about words like mongrel

and the infertility of mules and mulattoes

while flipping through a book of baby names.

She has come home to wait out the long months,

her room unchanged since she’s been gone:

dolls winking down from every shelf —- all of them

white. Every day she is flanked by the rituals of superstition,

and there is a name she will learn for this too:

maternal impression —- the shape, like an unknown

country, marking the back of the newborn’s thigh.

For now, women tell her to clear her head, to steady her hands

or she’ll gray a lock of the child’s hair wherever

she worries her own, imprint somewhere the outline

of a thing she craves too much. They tell her

to stanch her cravings by eating dirt. All spring

she has sat on her hands, her fingers numb. For a while

each day, she can’t feel anything she touches: the arbor

out back —- the landscape’s green tangle; the molehill

of her own swelling. Here —- outside the city limits —-

cars speed by, clouds of red dust in their wake.

She breathes it in —- Mississippi —- then drifts toward sleep,

thinking of someplace she’s never been. Late,

Mississippi is a dark backdrop bearing down

on the windows of her room. On the TV in the corner,

the station signs off, broadcasting its nightly salutation:

the waving Stars and Stripes, our national anthem.

—- Natasha Trethewey, from “Native Guard” (Houghton Miflin)

Natasha Trethewey, English professor at Emory University, holds the Phillis Wheatley Distinguished Chair in Poetry. Her collection “Native Guard” (Houghton Miflin) was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

—-

WHAT HE SAID

From Obama’s landmark speech on race, Philadelphia, March 18

This is where we are right now. It’s a racial stalemate we’ve been stuck in for years. Contrary to the claims of some of my critics, black and white, I have never been so naive as to believe that we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle, or with a single candidacy —- particularly a candidacy as imperfect as my own.

But I have asserted a firm conviction —- a conviction rooted in my faith in God and my faith in the American people —- that working together we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds, and that in fact we have no choice if we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union.

For the African-American community, that path means embracing the burdens of our past without becoming victims of our past. It means continuing to insist on a full measure of justice in every aspect of American life. But it also means binding our particular grievances —- for better health care, and better schools and better jobs —- to the larger aspirations of all Americans: the white woman struggling to break the glass ceiling, the white man who’s been laid off, the immigrant trying to feed his family. And it means taking full responsibility for own lives —- by demanding more from our fathers, and spending more time with our children, and reading to them, and teaching them that while they may face challenges and discrimination in their own lives, they must never succumb to despair or cynicism; they must always believe that they can write their own destiny.

In the white community, the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination —- and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past —- are real and must be addressed. Not just with words, but with deeds —- by investing in our schools and our communities; by enforcing our civil rights laws and ensuring fairness in our criminal justice system; by providing this generation with ladders of opportunity that were unavailable for previous generations. It requires all Americans to realize that your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams; that investing in the health, welfare and education of black and brown and white children will ultimately help all of America prosper.

—-

“If race is a dominant part of the campaign, and it seems to be becoming part of it every day, you can’t ignore it. But you need to look for people who are right-thinking and who can move beyond it.”

JACK ELLIS, an Obama supporter and the first black man to be elected mayor of Macon (in 1999)