The Best American Essays 2016 (49 page)

—Jorge Luis Borges, “The Cruel Redeemer Lazarus Morell”

But any fool can see that the white people are not really white, and that black people are not black.

—Albert Murray,
The Omni-Americans

Our white is so white you can paint a chunka coal and you’d have to crack it open with a sledge hammer to prove it wasn’t white clear through.

—Ralph Ellison,
Invisible Man

T
HERE IS A
millennia-old philosophical experiment that has perplexed minds as fine and diverse as those of Socrates, Plutarch, and John Locke. It’s called Theseus’s Paradox (or the Ship of Theseus), and the premise is this: The mythical founding-king of Athens kept a thirty-oar ship docked in the Athenian harbor. The vessel was preserved in a seaworthy state through the continual replacement of old timber planks with new ones, piecemeal, until the question inevitably arose: after all of the original planks have been replaced by new and different planks, is it still, in fact, the
same
ship?

For some time now, a recurring vision has put me in mind of Theseus and those shuffling pieces of wood. Only it’s people I see and not boats: a lineage of people distending over time. At the end of the line, there is a teenage boy with fair skin and blond hair and probably light eyes, seated at a café table somewhere in Europe. It is fifty or sixty years into the future. And this boy, gathered with his friends, is glibly remarking—in the dispassionate tone of one of my old white Catholic-school classmates claiming to have Cherokee or Iroquois blood—that as improbable as it would seem to look at him, apparently he had black ancestors once upon a time in America. He says it all so matter-of-factly, with no visceral aspect to the telling. I imagine his friends’ vague surprise, perhaps a raised eyebrow or two or perhaps not even that—and if I want to torture myself, I can detect an ironic smirk or giggle. Then, to my horror, I see the conversation grow not ugly or embittered or anything like that but simply pass on, giving way to other lesser matters, plans for the weekend or questions about the menu perhaps. And then it’s over. Just like that, in one casual exchange, I see a history, a struggle, a whole vibrant and populated world collapse without a trace. I see an entirely different ship.

I met my wife in a bar off of the Place de la Bataille de Stalingrad, in Paris. That was almost five years ago. At the time I was at the end of my twenties and in the middle of one of the only legitimate bachelor phases I’ve enjoyed as an adult. Otherwise, there had been a series of more or less monogamous relationships of varying lengths: a frivolous year surfing couches with a Gujarati girl from Toronto; a poignant stint in Buenos Aires with an elegant black girl from Virginia; eight perfect then imperfect and seemingly inexorable years with a Nigerian-Italian chef from uptown Manhattan (with an interlude of six intensely felt months in college with my French TA, an exchange student from Nancy); and four turbulent teenage years with my first love, someone LL Cool J could easily describe as an around-the-way girl, from Plainfield, New Jersey. But on that clear January night, in a warm bar overlooking the frigid canal, there was no one else, and I was accountable solely to myself.

Valentine came with a mutual friend, sat down catty-corner to me, and—who knows how these things actually work—something in her bearing triggered a powerful response. I found her insouciant pout and mane of curls flowing over the old fur coat she was bundled in exotic. We hardly spoke, but before I left, I gave her my email address on the chance she found herself in New York, where I was living at the time. Two months later, while there on a reporting assignment, Valentine wrote me, and we met a few days later for a drink. That was when I discovered that she was funny and not really insouciant at all, just shy about her English. It turned out we had a lot in common. I saw her a second time a month later in New York and then again on a work trip to Paris two months after that. Summer had just begun, and we fell in love extremely fast. When it was time to go home, she asked me to change my itinerary and join her in Corsica for a week. I did, and when it was really time to leave, she promised to visit me that August in New York. A few days after she landed, I proposed on a rooftop in Brooklyn, overlooking the Empire State Building and the orange Manhattan sky.

In retrospect, it had been a very long time by then since I’d thought of myself as having any kind of
type
. It wasn’t a conscious decision; it was simply the more I’d studied at large universities, the more I’d traveled and lived in big cities, the more women I’d encountered at home and away—which is just to say the more I’d ventured from my own backyard and projected myself into the world—the more I found myself unwilling to preemptively cordon off any of it. And yet—however naive this could seem now—I had somehow always also taken for granted that when the time came to have them, my children would, like me, be black.

A year ago to the day that I write this, Valentine’s water broke after a late dinner. In a daze of elation, we did what we’d planned for weeks and woke our brother-in-law, who gamely drove us from our apartment in the northern ninth arrondissement to the
maternité
, all the way on Paris’s southern edge. At two in the morning we had the streets practically to ourselves, and the route he took—down the hill from our apartment, beneath the greened copper and gold of the opera house and through the splendor of the Louvre’s courtyard, with its pyramids of glass and meticulous gardens, over the River Seine, with Notre Dame rising in the distance on one side and the Palais Royal and the Eiffel Tower shimmering on the other, and down the wide, leafy Boulevards Saint-Germain and Raspail, into Montparnasse, through that neon intersection of cafés from the pages of
A Moveable Feast
—was unspeakably gorgeous. I am not permanently awake to Paris’s beauty or even its strangeness, but that night, watching the city flit by my window, it did strike me that such a place—both glorious and fundamentally not mine—would be my daughter’s hometown.

Another twenty-four hours elapsed before Marlow arrived. When Valentine finally went into labor, even I was delirious with fatigue and not so much standing by her side as levitating there, sustained by raw emotion alone and thinking incoherently at best. On the fourth or fifth push, I caught a snippet of the doctor’s rapid-fire French: “Something, something, something,
tête dorée
. . .” It took a minute before my sluggish mind registered and sorted the sounds, and then it hit me that she was
looking
at my daughter’s head and reporting back that it was
blond
. The rest is the usual blur. I caught sight of a tray of placenta, heard a brand-new scream, and nearly fainted. The nurses whisked away my daughter, the doctor saw to my wife, and I was left to wander the empty corridor until I found the men’s room, where I shut myself and wept, like all the other newborns on the floor—a saline cascade of joy and exhaustion, terror and awe mingling together and flooding out of me in unremitting sobs. When, finally, I’d washed my face and returned to meet my beautiful, healthy child, she squinted open a pair of inky-blue irises that I knew even then would lighten considerably but never turn brown. For this precious little being grasping for milk and breath, I felt the first throb of what has been every minute since then the sincerest love I know. An hour or so after that, when Valentine and the baby were back in their room for the night, I fell into a taxi, my own eyes absentmindedly retracing that awfully pretty route. For the first time I can remember, I thought of Theseus’s ship.

I realize now that this vision of the boy from the future I’ve had in my head for the past year traces itself much further back into the past. It must necessarily stretch back at least to 1971, in San Diego, where my father, who was—having been born in 1937 in Jim Crow Texas—the
grandson
of a woman wed to a man born before the Emancipation Proclamation, met my mother, the native-Californian product of European immigrants from places as diverse as Austria-Hungary, Germany, England, and France. This unlikely courtship came all of four years after the
Loving v. Virginia
verdict repealed antimiscegenation laws throughout the country. In ways that are perhaps still impossible for me to fully appreciate, their romance amounted to a radical political act, though now, some four decades on, it seems a lot less like any form of defiance than like what all successful marriages fundamentally must be: the obvious and undeniable joining of two people who love and understand each other enormously.

But that’s not the beginning either. This trajectory I now find myself on no more starts in San Diego than in Paris. Not since it is extremely safe to assume that my father, with his freckles, with his mother’s Irish maiden name, and with his skin a shade of brown between polished teak and red clay, did not arrive from African shores alone. As James Baldwin, perspicacious as ever, noted of his travels around precisely the kind of segregated southern towns my father would instantly recognize as home, the line between “whites” and “coloreds” in America has always been traversed and logically imprecise: “The prohibition . . . of the social mingling [revealing] the extent of the sexual amalgamation.” There were (and still are) “girls the color of honey, men nearly the color of chalk, hair like silk, hair like cotton, hair like wire, eyes blue, gray, green, hazel, black, like the gypsy’s, brown like the Arab’s, narrow nostrils, thin, wide lips, thin lips, every conceivable variation struck along incredible gamuts.” Indeed, to be black (or
white
) for any significant amount of time in America is fundamentally to occupy a position on the mongrel spectrum—strict binaries have always failed spectacularly to contain this elementary truth.

And yet in spite of that, I’ve spent the past year trying to think my way through the wholly absurd question of what it means for a person to be or not to be black. It’s an existential Rubik’s Cube I thought I’d solved and put away in childhood. My parents were never less than adamant on the point that both my older brother and I are black. And in the many ways simpler New Jersey world we grew up in—him in the seventies and eighties, me in the eighties and nineties—tended to receive us that way without significant protest, especially when it came to other blacks. This is probably because, on a certain level,
every
black American knows what, again, Baldwin knew: “Whatever he or anyone else may wish to believe . . . his ancestors are both white and black.” Still, in the realm of lived experience, race is nothing if not an improvisational feat, and it would be in terribly bad faith to pretend there is not some fine, unspoken, and impossible-to-spell-out balance to all of this. And so I cannot help but wonder if indeed a threshold—the full consequences of which I may or may not even see in my own lifetime—has been crossed. (It’s not a wholly academic exercise either, since my father was an only child and in the past year my brother married and had a daughter with a woman from West Siberia.)

“Aw, son,” Pappy chuckled warmly when he cradled Marlow in his arms the first time, “she’s just a
palomino
!” There was—indeed, there still is—something so comforting to me in his brand of assurance. It’s certainly true that in his day and in his fading Texas lexicon, black people could be utterly unflappable when presented with all kinds of improbable mélanges, employing a near infinitude of esoteric terms (not infrequently drawn from the world of horse breeding, which can sound jarring to the contemporary ear) to describe them. I myself had to whip out my iPhone and Google
palomino
(“a pale golden or tan-colored horse with a white mane and tail, originally bred in the southwestern U.S.”), but I’d also grown up with other vocabulary, like
high yellow
and
mulatto
and, in my father’s house if nowhere else, those now-anachronistic and loaded terms
quadroon
and
octoroon
.

What bizarre words these are. But what a perfectly simple reality they labor to conceal and contain. When you get all the way down to it, what all these elaborate, nebulous descriptors really signify is nothing more complicated than that in the not-so-distant past, if she did not willfully break from her family and try her luck at passing for white (in the fashion of, say, the Creole author of
Kafka Was the Rage
, Anatole Broyard), Marlow, blue eyes and all, would have been disenfranchised and subjugated like all the rest of us—the wisdom, discipline, and brilliant style of American blackness would have been her birthright as well. And so there was for a long time something that could be understood as a more or less genuinely unified experience—not without its terrible hardships but conversely rife with profound satisfactions—which had nothing, or very close to nothing, to do with genetics. Indeed, even though the absurdity of race is always most pellucid at the margins, my daughter’s case wouldn’t even have been considered marginal in the former slave states, where theories about hypo-descent were most strictly observed and a person with as undetectable an amount as one-thirty-second “black blood” could be “legally” designated “colored.” Which is only to say, despite all of the horrifically cruel implications of so-called one-drop laws, until relatively quite recently there was a space reserved for someone like Marlow fully within the idea of what used to be called the American Negro.

But it is not hard to notice that the impulse toward unquestioning inclusiveness (as a fully justifiable and admirable reaction to
exclusiveness
) is going in an increasing number of precincts wherever it is terms like
Negro
go to retire. The reason has less to do with black people suddenly forgetting their paradoxical origins than with the idea of whiteness continually growing, however reluctantly, less exclusive. With greater than a third of the American population now reporting at least one family member of a different race, and with, since the year 2000, the option to select any combination of races on the census form, the very idea of black Americans as a fundamentally mulatto population is fraying at the seams.