Black, White and Jewish - Brief Article

`MY PARENTS DO NOT BELIEVE THAT BLOOD MUST NECESSARILY BE THICKER THAN WATER, BECAUSE WATER IS WHAT THEY ARE TO EACH OTHER, AND THEY WILL BE TOGETHER DESPITE LAWS THAT SAY THEY CAN'T.'

I don't remember things. Like the names of streets and avenues I have driven down a hundred times, like the stories behind Jewish holidays I have celebrated since I was 11, like the date of my father's birthday. At a funeral for a favorite uncle, I do not remember the names of cousins I played with as a child. For a few minutes, I do not remember the name of my dead uncle's wife. On her porch I stand blankly between her outstretched arms, my head spinning, suddenly unsure even of the ground upon which I stand. Who am I and why am I here? I cannot remember how we all are related.

There are thousands of large and small omissions, bits of information I swear normal people have built into their DNA: the speed of light, so-and-so's running mate 12 years ago, the capital of Wyoming, the way Treasury bills work. Mostly, I'm not bothered by my mind's resistance to what it considers meaningless, but sometimes I feel oddly off balance, like the whole world has figured out how to cope, how to master life on the grid, but me. Without a memory that invests in information retention, without a memory that can remind me at all times of who I definitively am, I feel amorphous, missing the unbroken black outline around my body that everyone else seems to have.

When they meet in 1965 in Jackson, Mississippi, my parents are idealists, they are social activists, they are Movement folk. They believe in ideas, leaders and the power of organized people working for change. They believe in justice and equality and freedom. My father is a liberal Jew who believes these abstractions can be realized through the swift, clean application of the Law. My mother believes they can be cultivated through the telling of stories, through the magic ability of words to redefine and create subjectivity. She herself is newly Black. She and my father comprise an "interracial couple."

By the time they fall in love, my parents do not believe in the ubersanctity of family. They do not believe that blood must necessarily be thicker than water, because water is what they are to each other, and they will be together despite laws that say they can't--they say that an individual should not be bound to the wishes of family, race, state or country. They say that love is the tie that binds, and not blood. In a photograph from their wedding day they stand, brown and pale pink, inseparable, my mother's tiny five-foot one-inch frame nestled birdlike within my father's protective embrace. Fearless, naive, breathtaking, they profess their shiny outlaw love for all the world to see.

Late one night during my first year at Yale, a WASP-looking Jewish student strolled into my room through the fire-exit door. He was drunk and twirling a Swiss Army knife between his nimble tennis-champion fingers.

"Are you really Black and Jewish?" he asked, slurring his words, pitching forward in an old raggedy armchair my roommate had covered with an equally raggedy white sheet. "How can that be possible?"

Maybe it was his drunkenness or perhaps he was actually trying to see me, but this boy squinted at me then, peering at my nose, my eyes, my hair. I stared back at him for a few moments, eyes flashing with rage, and then took the red knife from his tanned and tapered fingers. As he clutched at the air above him I held it back, and told him in a voice I wanted him to be sure was Black that I thought he'd better go.

But after he left through the (still) unlocked exit door, I sat for quite a while in the dark. Am I possible?

I am not a bastard, the product of a rape, the child of some White devil. I am a Movement child. My parents tell me I can do anything I put my mind to, that I can be anything I want. They buy me Erector sets and building blocks, Tinkertoys and books, more and more books. Berenstain Bears, Dr. Seuss, Hans Christian Andersen. We are middle-class. My mother puts a colorful patterned scarf on her head and throws parties for me in our backyard, under the carport and beside the creek. She invites all my friends over and watches over us as we roast hot dogs. She makes Kool-Aid and laughs when one of us kids does something cute or funny.

I am not tragic.

Rebecca Walker is a writer and contributing editor to Ms. magazine. Considered one of the most audible and accessible voices of her generation, she is founder of Third Wave Foundation, the only national activist philanthropic organization for young women between the ages of 15 and 30. She lives in Berkeley, California. This book is her literary debut.

Reprinted from Black White and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self by Rebecca Walker with permission of Riverhead Books, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc. Copyright [C]2001 by Rebecca Walker.

COPYRIGHT 2001 Essence Communications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group