The Paradox of a Fair-Skinned Black Girl in the Segregated South
Wylene felt safe despite the burning cross on her lawn and the subtler affronts that colored her Arkansas childhood. She never expected her deepest trauma to be inflicted by someone of her own race.
If this isn’t your first time here, you probably know by now that we’re in the midst of our 2024 Narratively Memoir Prize. (If it is your first time, welcome!) We recently shared “Does My Love for a Straight Man Change My Queer Identity?” from Rachel Parsons, one of the two finalists from our 2023 Memoir Prize, in a lead-up to the contest deadline. Today, we’re happy to re-share the essay from the other finalist, Wylene Branton Wood. It’s a moving piece from her memoir-in-progress about identity, perception and more. We hope you enjoy it.
Have a story to tell and want to submit to this year’s prize? Head here!
It was September 1957. The sun was hidden by the evening sky, but it was too early for bedtime. So, I sat on the blue plush carpet in my parents’ bedroom at the front of our house, leaning against the wall by the door. While sitting with a Nancy Drew mystery, I had a full view of my mother, who lay in bed, weak and ailing, having just come home from Davis Hospital’s maternity ward in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, where we lived. She came home without her baby, my youngest sibling, Debbie, who had been born much too soon. At 4 pounds 4 ounces, she was still fighting for her life in a hospital incubator.
I don’t think I was accustomed to reading in my parents’ bedroom and imagine that I was keeping an eye on my mother, who had been hospitalized and away from us for several days. I guess I was making sure she was OK and glad to have her home, although I would not have said that to her then. I was 7 1/2 and must have felt relieved to have her back, safe, alive, since I have a vague memory of my father gathering us five older children and telling us in a hoarse voice that Mother was very, very sick and she might not be able to come home.
This night, Daddy was probably on his way home from Little Rock, where he was helping nine Black teenagers who were trying to integrate Central High School there. That’s how he described his work to us, by telling us what he was trying to do. I understood later that he was in fact the chief counsel in the Arkansas school desegregation case. He had called Mother, as he always did, when he was starting out on the highway to come home. For many years, I thought those phone calls before he set out on the road were so Mother would be able to have dinner hot and ready for him when he got home, or so she had time to take the curlers from her hair and pretty up for him. It was not until I grew up, however, that I realized those calls were safety measures. This work was dangerous, and if he did not return home by a certain time, Mother would know to send out a search party to make sure he had not been run off the road, kidnapped or worse by people who did not want him helping to integrate Central High.
My brothers and sisters were playing in their rooms or getting ready for bed and being extra quiet to give Mother some peace when, suddenly, my 11-year-old brother, Ricky, ran to Mother’s bedside.
“Mother, Mother,” he shrieked. “There’s a cross burning in the front yard!”
Mother rose weakly onto one elbow and looked out of the window beside her bed. Then, she gave instructions in her hurry-up voice.
“Ricky, tell all the children to get under the beds and you close all the blinds,” she ordered. “Then, you get under the bed. Right now!”
Mother looked at me still sitting by the door as she reached for the phone beside her bed.
“Go on, Wylene, get under your bed and don’t come out until I tell you to.”
Once outside my mother’s room, I told Ricky, “I’ll help you close the blinds, but I want to see it.”
It was OK with him, as we were buddies. We shut all the blinds. Then, Ricky peeped out of a window in the little kids’ bedroom that was also on the front side of the house. He lifted a slat in the blinds, and he helped me raise a slat so I could see, too. There were bright yellow-orange flames tinged with blue whipping against the night air. The flames gave the impression of a cross. I saw no people standing around, and I did not hear a hiss or sizzle or crackle, but I am sure that what I later learned was burning wood and burlap soaked in kerosene probably made some noise. My mother must have called my great-uncle Frank, who lived next door with his sister, my paternal grandmother, because he ran over, doused the flames and uprooted the cross. The next time I looked out, well, actually the fourth or fifth time, as far as I could see in the dark, the cross lay harmlessly steaming on the ground.
A short while later my father got home, gathered us kids and told us, “Some people who don’t like the work I’m doing in Little Rock burned that cross on our lawn. They did it to frighten me, but don’t let it frighten you. You are safe.” He said the cab drivers at 98 Taxi, which he owned, as well as the Pine Bluff Police Department were going to be patrolling around our block regularly for the next few days, making sure we were all OK. Later, I heard that several of the cab drivers were armed, ready to defend themselves or the Branton family as circumstances demanded. My father, too, who had always said he was non-violent, unpacked the revolver he had been given when he served during World War II. I rarely saw the gun, but I heard him tell Uncle Frank that he kept it ready to protect himself and his family.
The next morning, my father showed us the front page of The Pine Bluff Commercial, our town newspaper. There was a large picture of a burned-out cross, but not the one that had been placed in our yard. The photo showed a similar cross that had been placed that same night on the cemetery plot belonging to the Wiley and Branton families. The giant monument on the hill was inscribed with words on two lines. The first line said “Wiley” and signified my paternal great grandparents and their immediate family, and the second line said “Branton,” representing my paternal grandparents and their children. The Ku Klux Klan, who were the apparent perpetrators, must have thought the monument was all about my father, Wiley Branton, rather than a marker for the Wiley and the Branton family members going back at least four generations.
“Don’t be afraid. Don’t worry about anything,” Daddy said.
And I didn’t worry, not then. It was not until I grew up and became aware of the extent of racial hatred in America that I worried for what might have been. For, as extraordinary as it might seem, I grew up an African American in this segregated town, a bastion of the K.K.K., a place where my father did civil rights work that put his life at risk every day, and I felt no fear.
It was the unique circumstances of our lives that made me feel safe. My father had generally good relationships with whites and Blacks, as he was known for being a man of kindness and integrity, even among our conservative white neighbors across the street. He also had professional standing in the community because of his reputation as a skillful lawyer and a good businessman due to the success of the taxi company. However, the overriding reason I felt no fear was because my parents worked diligently to protect us children from the fears and stresses of racism.
Everyone in my family had fair skin and could easily pass for white except for my older brother, Ricky, who had been born to my mother and her first husband, Hugh Zinn. Ricky looked like his father, with smooth brown skin and thick hair that coiled in tight curls at his scalp. My father, who loved Ricky as his own, convinced Daddy Zinn to let him adopt Ricky, and, eventually, Daddy Zinn agreed.
My parents mostly obeyed the laws of segregation in our small town, but they were determined that their children would not feel deprived because of their race. My father would put us all in the car at night and take us to the Dairy Queen, where Negroes were not allowed. We would remain in the car while he went to get ice cream treats for all of us. And we were rarely allowed to go to the segregated movie theaters, but my dad bought a film projector and ordered prints from New York so that we could see Casper the Friendly Ghost and Little Lulu cartoons at home. A community activist, he also worked with other community leaders to erect a park and recreational facility for Negroes in Pine Bluff, since our people were forbidden in the city parks. Townsend Park with its playgrounds, picnic areas, swimming pool and recreation center became an important feature of our community and of my childhood.
Although I attended all-Black schools, segregated by law, I never felt deprived, and, even now, feel that I received a generally good basic education. My parents paid $10 a week for me to attend The Training School, the private elementary school on the campus of Arkansas Agricultural, Mechanical and Normal College (AM&N), which is now the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff. Students at the college in the education department did their practice teaching at The Training School. Probably fewer than 70 students were enrolled there during any year of my attendance in grades one through six, with no more than five full-time teachers at any given time. I recall the names, faces and personalities of all the teachers I knew during those years of my social and educational development. The education they gave me was broad and holistic and delivered with commitment and affection, so I was never afraid of my teachers or of going to school.
Now, as a grown woman, I cringe at the memory, at the unbelievable absence of fear I experienced during my childhood and especially on the night of the cross burning. I will never know what fears and angst my parents suffered during that night, that period of their lives, for my protectors are long gone. But I imagine the fear for their family’s safety was a burden they weighed against their work to secure justice for the entire Negro race. I doubt they could express their fears to anyone but each other, and I imagine their late-night conversations, a different kind of pillow talk, in the soft light of the brass lamp beside the bed as they lay close.
My father might have said, “Baby, am I doing the right thing? This fight for school integration is such a public battle with the governor, with the press involvement. This work of mine is bringing danger home to me, to you and to the kids.”
My mother, in her white lace gown, would have leaned in close to him. “This is important work. If you don’t do it, who will? It will make a difference for our children and for their children. You have to keep going. We’ll be careful, but you can do this. You must do this work. There may be enemies and detractors, but there are so many who are depending on you to fight for them. Those nine kids in Little Rock are depending on you. Daisy Bates is depending on you. Our kids are depending on you. You have the skill, the personality and the smarts to push the system toward justice, and you can do it.”
Then, she would have removed his socks, as she did each night, and she would have held him close, his partner in all things. I think of my dad, smiling at her with misty eyes. “If you are with me, I can do anything,” he’d say.
In those days, they were not alone. The Negro middle/upper class of Pine Bluff and throughout Arkansas stood with them, just as they had a decade earlier when my father was convicted of voting fraud. In truth, he had reproduced copies of a sample ballot appearing in the local newspaper and simply used them to teach the Negroes in Pine Bluff the mechanics of voting. He was fined some $300, and members of our community each sent $10 donations to see that the fine was paid. As I perused some of his papers after his death in 1988, I found a yellowed sheet of notebook paper with a list of names of those who had helped pay the fine. My father never forgot them. They knew his efforts were for them. They knew his arrest had been politically and racially motivated. According to my father, until the time of his death, he believed he was the only person ever charged under that law.
I’m certain as Mother reached to turn off the lamp that she also would have reminded him of the cab drivers at 98 Taxi, grateful men willing to do his bidding; willing to stand with him and protect him and all that he loved. She would have reminded him of the good and fair wages he paid them, of the dignity he afforded them and the respect he showed them. He had given these men, uneducated and unemployed, a chance for an honorable life, and to work for someone who cared about them and their troubles; permission to drive new and nearly new Buicks, and a steady income. They would willingly and gladly patrol the streets around his home, transport his children to school and be ready in an instant to defend him.
I had no fear of the burning cross the night the Ku Klux Klan threatened our world, as I felt safe in our home. While my educational, social and church activities were always with other Negroes, I did not generally feel oppressed by segregation. After all, I did not know the experience of integration I was missing. The threats I feared were not that I would be harmed, but that I would be rejected, for social insecurity and personal inadequacy were what tormented my youth.
It did not bother me to sit in the balcony of the Saenger Theater on the very few occasions when Daddy would allow me to go there. It also did not bother me that the Lion’s Den in Pine Bluff and the National Baptist Hotel in Hot Springs were the only places where our family might go out to dinner. These were the popular gathering spots, Negro-owned, culturally rich and desirable places to be. In fact, as insecure as I was, I would occasionally cross the narrow road separating the Lion’s Den from my elementary school. As a sixth grader, I was no longer required to endure nap time on my folding cot, which meant I had more lunch time. I was allowed the choice to eat the hot lunch carted into my school, to bring my lunch from home or to go to the Lion’s Den. Many times, I would enter the Lion’s Den, named after AM&N’s football team (Go Lions!), and I’d find an empty table in the crowded space. It was a long room with booths on one side, tables for two or four in the middle and a long counter in front of the kitchen. The right end of the counter was set up with stools for service, and the left end was a glass case with all manner of sweet delights: Junior Mints, Paydays, Sugar Daddies, Red Hots, Three Musketeers and more, and on top of the counter were huge jars of pickles, cookies and sour balls.
Inevitably, I’d order a glass of iced tea and a gravy sandwich, which was simply two slices of Wonder Bread dripping with hot beef gravy. I thought it was heavenly, and I felt so grown-up, sitting at a table by myself and paying my 10 cents bill. There might on occasion be two or three white people in the restaurant, but I never questioned their presence, for everyone was welcome at the Lion’s Den.
Everyone was welcomed in my home, too, at least, it seemed so since my parents opened their home to friends and colleagues from out of state, people who otherwise would have had difficulty obtaining good food or lodging due to Jim Crow laws. So, I had no fear of “new” people and looked forward to every Christmas Eve when Mr. Hampton (whose name has been changed along with a few others in this story), a white businessman, visited us and brought a large two-layer box of Whitman’s Sampler candy, or when I chatted with whites and Negroes I met at my father’s law office.
I was also unafraid of the white people who lived across the street, and I felt comfortable chatting with them and playing with their children. I remember, though, only one instance when one of those neighbors visited our home. It was the day after the cross burning. Mrs. Palmer, who often sat in her front yard and watched the neighborhood kids, including hers, play in our side yard, was standing at the door when I answered the knock.
“I’d like to visit with your mother, if it’s OK,” she said. “Would you ask her?”
“OK,” I said, “just a minute.” And I left her at the door while I went to check with Mother.
“Oh, Lord,” Mother moaned, clearly not welcoming the visit, as she had had an allergic reaction to the penicillin she was given the day before and had an embarrassing rash. She sat against the pillows of her bed in her white satin gown.
“Turn off the ceiling lights,” she instructed. “Just leave on the lamp by my bed.”
I did that and then I ushered Mrs. Palmer to a chair far away from Mother’s bed and left the room. I don’t know what Mrs. Palmer said to my mother, but I imagine she offered regrets for the cross burning, which she had to have seen. I am sure she offered concern for Mother’s general health after her precarious childbirth and hospitalization. And it now occurs to me that Mrs. Palmer may have known or even seen the Klan members who set the cross afire in our yard, but I don’t think she would have condoned such an act. She supported segregation, but she was, I think, a product of the times and of her rearing. She always smiled, and her thin features and short brown hair made her seem down-to-earth and reliable. I think she was a generally good person, and I never feared her or other neighbors across the street, all of them white.
Mrs. Palmer’s sons, Bobby, Jimmy and Derek, played hide-and-seek and softball with us in our large yard, and there were never any problems, but I had a closer relationship with Jenny Johnson. Jenny was a white girl. We were friends, sort of. She lived across the street from me in a whole different world. Her house was in a row of nearly identical shotgun structures, clapboard painted white. I saw the small front lawns, but I rarely saw the occupants of the houses except when Jenny and her little sister, Mandy, or the Palmer boys came over to play.
Jenny was my age, 9, and I say Jenny and I were “sort of” friends because we did not share all of ourselves with each other the way good friends do. Our schools were different, we had no friends in common and our parents did not socialize with each other. Jenny lived in the white world, and I lived in the world of second best. Never mind my parents were far more educated than hers or that our large custom brick home was much more attractive than hers. Never mind that my family income was much higher and my parents’ sophistication much greater. It was the way of the South in 1957. Black and white children might happen to play together, but, for me, at least, there was no depth of feeling, no sharing of problems or family gossip, no commiserating about hard subjects in school or mean teachers, no complaining about homework or parents. It was just a matter of passing the time with someone different, someone you might like but would never really know.
Jenny would just show up at our house. She’d come without an invitation, but we always welcomed her. She was thin and had stringy, shoulder-length, chestnut-colored hair. Sometimes she’d bring 5-year-old Mandy, who was sweet and honest, not having learned that family business should stay in the family. Mandy would blurt out who was sick and report on how many times they vomited or that her parents had had a fight. Jenny would shush her up, and we’d continue to play jacks or pick-up sticks, or we’d watch The Mickey Mouse Club on our TV.
Often Jenny would stay for dinner, and she really liked my mother’s cooking. But my sister Toni and I were invited to her house only once. It was for lunch, not dinner. Jenny got permission from her mother to have us over, and we got the OK from our mother to go. I was excited to see inside Jenny’s house, to meet her mother and to taste her mother’s cooking.
My sister Toni and I walked across the street and were met at the door by Mrs. Johnson. She was tall and thin and wore a red-checked apron with pockets and a bib.
“You all go on over and sit down at the table,” she said without emotion.
“Oh, I love this!” I squealed when I saw, not a regular table and chairs set, but a red leather-looking booth like you’d see in a restaurant. I had never seen a booth in a house, but it fit perfectly on one side of the small kitchen. The other side was part of a passageway that went straight through the house. We never saw any other part of the house, for Mrs. Johnson served us our Franco-American spaghetti (which I had never had before), and rushed us outside to play once Mr. Johnson came home.
It must have been unexpected because Mrs. Johnson seemed surprised, asking “Is everything OK?” Mr. Johnson grunted in our direction as he passed by us on his way to the back of the house. He did not greet us at all, but his frown and tense manner made me think he was upset about something. Mrs. Johnson hurried after him and was gone for several minutes. I could hear what sounded like an argument, although I could not make out their actual words. Mr. Johnson raised his voice, and I heard a drawer or a door slam. Mrs. Johnson seemed to plead with him. When she returned to the kitchen, her face was red, and her eyes were puffy as if she might cry.
“You kids hurry up and finish eating and go play outside,” she said. There was no dessert and no “Come back and see us.” Jenny rarely came to our house after that. In fact, her family moved away a few weeks later.
Maybe Mr. Johnson got a better job. Maybe he and his wife were having marriage problems. That’s what I thought at the time. Now, though, I suspect Mr. Johnson did not want his kids having so much contact with “colored people.” He never said anything to us directly, but he sure did seem angry when he came home early that day and found us in his house, at his table, eating his food. In any case, I never saw Jenny Johnson again after that summer, but I think about her sometimes.
I remember being annoyed by something she said. I had not seen her in a while, and she just showed up one day. We were playing with my Mr. Potato Head and chatting about clothes and music when she asked, “How’s Alice?” Now, Alice was a grown lady my mother’s age, and I felt close to her. She was married to our family doctor, and they lived right behind our property. She was like family to me.
“She’s fine,” I said, “but I call her Aunt Alice and you should, too.”
“No,” Jenny said, staring at me. “I call her Alice. She’s just Alice to me.”
I didn’t have the know-how or the courage to challenge her further, but, even at 9 years old, I thought she was disrespectful of Aunt Alice, and that bothered me. It was not because Jenny was white that I did not challenge her. It was because she was so sure she had the right to say what she said. It may seem like a small thing, but her comment, her insistence on calling Aunt Alice by her first name was testament to the different worlds in which we lived and how our values, habits and perceptions were incompatible.
Jenny and I never talked about race or why we didn’t go to the same school or why her parents were never invited to our house. I wish we had. Our friendship might have spanned the years if we had been able to be honest with each other, to ask questions and discuss how we were similar and how we were different. We might have studied together or braided each other’s hair. We might have talked each other through our insecurities or been understanding when our parents were not. It was a lost opportunity, a risk we did not, could not take, for to have done so would have defied the dictum of the South: “If you’re white, you’re all right; if you’re Black, stand back.”
But thanks to my parents, the decisions they made and how they lived their lives, I was cocooned in an environment of love and safety, largely shielded from the traumas of racism and the worst instincts of the human heart. Yet, they could not have known that trauma could be inflicted on me by someone of our own race.
“You go home, you old white girl!” That’s what the Negro boy with white skin said to me on that spring day in Pine Bluff. I was 9 years old and walking two blocks home from church when I crossed his path. He was standing on the sidewalk at the corner of Georgia Street and 13th Avenue and had been watching my approach.
I was feeling good because the church music director, Mrs. McGhee, had asked me to stay after youth choir practice to work on a duet she wanted me to sing with Richard Carr, my brother’s best friend. The duet, “Because,” was for a Tom Thumb wedding the church was presenting. Richard not only had a sweet voice, but also my brother had told me that Richard was sweet on me. I thought he was cute, and I knew he was nice, so I felt special and happy to be singled out by Mrs. McGhee, by Richard — I was full of myself that day.
I walked alone because the other kids had left after regular choir practice. I didn’t mind, and my parents didn’t mind me walking the L-shaped route from home to church and back. My father had given my siblings and me only one unbreakable rule when we were away from home: Never get in a car with someone you don’t know. But, anyway, I liked to walk, and I knew that path so well. It was a big part of my world, familiar and safe. It was a small Negro community surrounded by a larger white community. It was my territory, and I felt in control and untroubled as I passed by the homes of prominent members of our race.
Leaving the massive oak door of the church, I glanced across the street at the Sunday-school building, where I spent so much time on Sundays and on weekdays in the summer. I turned left onto the sidewalk toward home and passed the shady side lawn of the church where earlier in the fall I had rescued a tiny wren that had fallen from its nest in the wide oak tree.
I saw the small, white-framed Foster house across the street. Henry Foster was in medical school, and he and Mrs. Foster were expecting a baby. I didn’t know then that the following summer I would be asked to watch that baby as it lay in a bassinet on the Fosters’ screened-in front porch while Mrs. Foster rested in bed. I didn’t know that years later Dr. Foster would be one of the most respected ob-gyns in America and would be sought after for high-ranking government positions. What I did know was that I loved this place, this neighborhood and all the people in it.
I walked on my side of Georgia Street, passing the brick steps that led up a small hill to the brown brick home of Dr. Clyde Lawlah. He was a physician, and his wife, Mrs. Cassa Lawlah, was a society lady and a leader in the Negro community. She and Daddy were on some of the same committees trying to make life better for Negroes in Pine Bluff. Sometimes after church, Daddy and I would stop by their house, where the lighting was often dim like a party setting, and there was always a lot of laughter and talking about politics and the community.
I glanced across the street at the corner of Georgia and 13th and saw President Jones and Mrs. Jones’s house. I laughed to myself whenever I saw their modern brick home because he insisted that everyone call him “President Jones,” even his wife. I had asked Daddy once, “What is President Jones president of?” Daddy said the older man had been head of some organization and after that, he made everyone call him “President.”
“It made him feel important,” Daddy said, laughing, and I thought it was funny, too.
Ahead of me, I saw the boy standing on the corner on my side of the street, across from the Jones’s house. I would have to pass him to make the left onto 13th Avenue. He was watching me, waiting for me, I thought. He was 10 or 11, taller than I, and his skin was actually paler than mine, paler than white. His short, sparse, blondish-white hair gave him an unnatural appearance. At least, I had never seen anyone who looked like him. I was not frightened by his appearance, though, for kids in the neighborhood had talked about him and described him. They made fun of him, but I wanted to meet him and be his friend.
He was born without pigmentation, whiter than any white person. We were both Negroes, both fair-skinned and “white-looking,” yet he saw me as “other” and treated me with disdain.
As I walked toward him, ready to say hello, I was disturbed by his words and the venom with which he spoke them. “You go home, you old white girl!! You go home!”
His hatred was as self-righteous and palpable as that of any white segregationist I had heard about, so I did not attempt to talk to him, to explain that I, too, was a Negro, that I was friendly and nice. I had wanted him to know I was different from the other kids who joked about his appearance. For, even when I was that young, I had a tenderness for those who were different, for those who were hurting in some way, for those who were rejected by others because I often felt different, rejected, myself.
I stood by him for a moment in disbelief. Then, I tried to move past him as quickly as possible as he shouted after me, calling me names.
“Get away from me, you old white girl! You don’t belong here!” was what he said. What I heard was, “You don’t fit in. You are not worthy because of how you look.”
His hatred, because of my skin color, was so clear. His thick lips drew back in a snarl, exposing his yellowed teeth, and his reddish eyes locked on me and stared me down until I moved away.
He scared me, not his appearance but, rather, his words and his manner.
I had been ready to say, “Hi, I’m Wylene. What’s your name?” However, the anger that flashed in this boy’s eyes and his bitter tone did not allow any chance for friendship. In fact, the incident has haunted me all my life. His obvious contempt for me reinforced my feelings of unworthiness and my discomfort with my skin color. For, the color of my skin was a disappointment to me and the root of my insecurity.
You see, I was born “colored.” My birth certificate says so. Later, according to the society, I became a “Negro,” then an “Afro-American,” later an “African-American,” then “Black” or “African American” (without the hyphen), and these days, I’m referred to as a “person of color, or a member of the BIPOC community.”
Each of these labels in its turn has suggested my cultural or family heritage, but I have never looked the part. My appearance has always contradicted my racial identity, for my fair skin and what some Black people considered to be “good” hair — because it did not need to be straightened — made me look white. All my life, my skin color has let me in or kept me out, kept me out of white society and the privileges attached to whiteness. In the Black community, it has sometimes been seen as a sign of beauty and privilege or as a mark of a traitor, of someone not quite trustworthy. It has labeled me as stuck-up, as being an elitist or a fraud.
So, my encounter with the boy who had albinism reminded me that not only white people were concerned with a person’s color. It was an unfortunate fact that Black people, too, people who had so much in common with one another, had attitudes about color, even among their own. For my whole childhood, I felt different, different from my classmates, shut out from their joy, their activities and their fellowship. I felt awkward on the playground, standing outside the circle where other girls were gathered, asking if I could play hopscotch or jump rope. No one ever said I couldn’t, but I did not feel welcomed by the group.
But I must ask myself why the boy verbally attacked me: Was it just my color, or was it the confluence of my color, my family’s prominence in the town, my father’s importance to the Negro community and our being better off financially than so many others? Or was the boy lashing out at me in the same way others had lashed out at him? Was he repeating words that had been hurled at him? Was he shutting me out as others had shut him out?
The neighborhood kids made cruel jokes about him, but they did not even know his name. I did not know his name. Now, so many years later, I think that was a symbol of the tragedy — that he had been so disrespected and shunned that no one bothered to know his name. I think I understand now why the boy treated me as he did. He gave me the treatment he had probably experienced all his life. In some ways we were alike, and perhaps that is why I was drawn to him. But his hurt turned to anger; mine became insecurity.
I longed to fit in, to be accepted, and for many years I felt my life would have been different, and I might have avoided a lot of heartache if I had been born with brown or Black skin, if I physically looked like who I was. I bet that boy wished he could look different, too.
Wylene Branton Wood retired from a 32-year teaching career, working with both middle school and college students. She had planned to write a prize-winning novel, but over the years, what called to her were memories of growing up in the segregated South, being the daughter of a civil rights leader and the role that color — her color — played in her life.
Molly Magnell is a freelance illustrator living in New York City.
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This story was originally published on February 22, 2024.
Thank you for this beautiful and haunting piece.