“Look. They’re brown.”
This whisper glides effortlessly across the bituminous tarmac with the lazy downward drift of a paper airplane perfectly creased then released. It sounds astonished, not malicious. Escaping with crystal clarity under the cracked-open glass of a narrow, five-foot-long steel-awning schoolroom window, it reaches the Fiver-like, olive-skinned ears of a skinny eleven-year-old, whose bony shoulders have already begun hunching for other reasons. For one, she’s an introvert who loves books. Hearing this surprisingly feral, disembodied curiosity, they inch an indiscernible fraction more in the direction of the cloudless sky, as she and her family navigate a scorching asphalt parking lot, a patch of melting blackness stranded smackdab in seemingly endless, green, cow-grazing pastures.
With each step, left then right, new sneakers reluctantly leave the sunned and sticky surface with a slight suck-suck sound.
She focuses her gaze resolutely forward, refusing a strong impulse to look left where the long pushed-out window is, but all the same she feels unseen eyes on her and her two sisters.
Her ears burn.
“ÆSˈ ə veɪdʌ.”
“HⱭTˈ pəˈteɪˌtʌ.”
“OƱˈ sʌˈvi doʊ.”
That’s roll call. I wince and pull the corners of my lips up and go along. It’s one reason today I pay attention to how my students’ names are pronounced.
It’s / Ɑˈ səˈveɪ doʊ /, I would say now.
At that point, though, we’re the only Acevedo in the White pages of the phone book. When I check, twelve by then, I don’t need another reason outside my own changing body to make me feel alien and not belonging, but there it is.
This changing makes me self-conscious because it feels like a threat. My bones warn, You drew the short gender straw. My mind asks how long I’ll evade the consequence by choosing too-big t-shirts that bury tender, growing peaks brushing up against their cotton, simultaneously thrilling and scaring me in a society signaling they will not be mine.
At home in the blue-green foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, I grow up eating steaming plates of fried chicken with collard greens and arroz con pollo, not at the same meal. My family and I fork fried liver and onions into mashed potatoes, and spoon black beans with rice and pork. We devour hot fluffy biscuits, we consume fried ripe plantains. We eat salty beef stew, we have spicy chicken fricassee. We enjoy homemade lemon meringue pies, and caramelized flan.
I drink gallons of ice-cold sweet brown tea. I mean Petticoat Junction water towers of it. Also as a kid visiting my dad’s relatives in Miami, I’m granted a grown-up’s breakfast that stars a hot demitasse cup filled to the brim with espresso-shot café con leche, and to the side, toasted Cuban bread for dunking. That is heaven.
Then for lunch we go out with an aunt who always wears bright colors and perfume even to a corner store for some Cuban sandwiches. That simple, underestimated combination of Cuban bread with ham, pork, cheese, pickles, mustard sets a never surpassed standard for sandwich excellence. In between meals, my cousins sneak my brother and me sugary contraband chunks of gritty dark-red guava paste sandwiched between impossibly thick, wonderfully creamy slices of sharply savory orange cheese.
With a White mother and a Brown father, I’m born into multiculturalism. At first it means summer trips to Florida from Georgia, a hardworking, taking-nothing-for-granted, overcompensating, flamboyant, brave grandfather who has a thick accent and difficulty with plurals, a different skin tone from those around me, and more, delicious food choices.
It becomes that happy energy I love when my aunts and uncles are all talking at once sitting on the front steps after supper, becoming more animated as the light goes and filling the night air in Little Havana with one “¡Mira!” and “¡Claro que sí!” after another, and smoke curling up from waved cigarettes. It’s being kissed on one cheek, then the other, often, hugged and patted by everybody.
It’s the flickering strangeness of tall votive candles lit and left burning at all hours, with figures on them like a woman looking down, eyes closed, her hands pressed together, dressed in a colorful robe from head to toe, short yellow-orange rays outlining her body. It is also on display on a table in one uncle’s TV room—the biggest, heaviest, loveliest round glass bottle I’ve ever seen, holding a darker-than-tea liquid, and when the sun shines through the window, it looks like amber, but the label on it reads R-U-M.
My skin is not as dark as my Miami cousins’ nor even my father’s Café Bustelo café-con-chocolate tone, since mine has a splash of my mother’s milk and of his mother’s added to it. I’m neither this nor that, but I love my olive hue, write about it in my journals, and feel very Brown looking at those around me.
This mixed-race background, and my gender, are not a fit for the 1970s-1980s South. I look and look for my place. Exclusively run by one end of the Fitzpatrick scale, and by strict commands in Genesis for some to “rule over” me, this world affords me scant space.
But my brave, indefatigably cheerful, hardworking mother faithfully makes PTA phone calls, organizes school fundraisers, bakes endless pound cakes that squeak, cleans up after Halloween school fests, keeps babies in the church nursery, and always makes time to do whatever others ask of her. The community’s respect for her many contributions plus her pigmentation largely protect me.
I thought even then, Others live differently from me—is so fascinating. It makes me feel alive tasting strangely sweet, sandy guava paste for the first time between two smooth slices of tangy cheese. It’s what I think going to school should be like, truly learning, without the torturous spelling tests and other challenges. Multiculturalism experienced as family and self is my first inoculation against society’s suffocating, and inherently violent binary codes.
The main discrimination for me—gender. Two exist then, one strong, one weak. One free, one government-legislated. One virile, one hysterical. I see a future of dishwashing, cooking, and diaper-changing ahead of me. A curtain coming down at the end of a play. Early on I sense that to complain about each unfairness will require constant interruption, incur punishment, and I’ll never get to do the things I want, so I know my place and stay in it, and work like the devil.
This prejudice is mainlined three times a week when my parents take my younger brother and two sisters and me on Wednesday nights and twice on Sundays—with the precision of an addiction—to a Southern Baptist church. Women are not equal with men there. This inequality does not make a person feel like a person.
We’re the only mixed-race family in the pews under that sharply white steeple. My mother and brother look local, she teases the mailman must’ve come through, but the rest of us are decidedly other. Still, my handsome father, who looks a lot like a Cuban Elvis Presley, becomes a glad-handing deacon and gets to stand solemn at the end of pews, one brown hand over the other, both resting where his jacket buttons, waiting straight as a sentry for the gleaming shallow dish, heavy with quarters, to make its way back.
During long church services dark suits stride cleanly up the steps to the pulpit to speak. Often they scream at me with authority. Decreeing women are made inferior by God and are required by divine law to be subservient to their husbands. In Sunday School I’m trained in Evangelical womanhood, which is that the highest, most noble possibility in life is marriage to a man, serving him as my superior; children shall follow, and the woman shall raise them.
As a child, this arrangement puzzles me to no end. If God is loving, how could he make me less-than someone else? Why do just men speak from raised places of power? Why do they shout angrily at me in church, towering over everyone else, while quiet women are always invisibly working, doing things behind-the-scenes that keep the church ticking over?
These questions have never been answered.
My school years are a mess. That likely makes me a kinder teacher.
We move once every two years or so, as my father has difficulty holding a job, and I find it hard to form new friendships that often.
As a student, I always feel wrong, incapable. Reading seems impossible. The words will not stay still. They float in and right back out. Letters switch places, s and c, d and b. Also words like now, no, know. I can’t focus. Standardized reading tests are the worst experience. They make my brain seize and halt. You have to read a passage you have no relationship to, like some jargon-laden textbook excerpt, which wouldn’t intimidate me today, but as a high school student, I’m caught in an undertow. At home we have Reader’s Digest, Guideposts, plus Billy Graham’s Angels on the lid of the toilet tank.
I get in trouble for talking in class. I have several years where I must have been such an annoying student. I try to remember that now, as a teacher. There’s even a black-and-white elementary school photo where I’m turned around talking to someone behind me. In another city a teacher puts me out in the hallway, right beside the classroom door, and the rite of passage is that kids file by on their way to the lunchroom and snicker and point. Even earlier, I’m sitting on a bench waiting for my mother to come pick me up, lucking out since she drove my father to work that day and has the car, and the memory is of soaked underpants and the soggy back of a Singer-sewn dress sticking to the cold metal, making me shiver.
I don’t begin to understand these failures until I’m helping a student who describes his difficulties with reading, which I silently notice resemble my earlier ones, and he says, “I have dyslexia.” I’ve never heard that word before, or if I have, it hasn’t registered. Next I happen on “Words Failed, Then Saved Me” by poet Philip Schulz in the New York Times, describing his late-diagnosed dyslexia, and it resonates. I’m like Ah, I see. I’m well into middle age, too, when I begin to have some compassion for my struggling childhood self.
Today the letters and words rarely switch places, but on occasion they do so gently, without impeding my reading much now. But from kindergarten through college, and beyond to a Ph.D., undiagnosed dyslexia causes me untold grief. I cannot focus and am always anxious. I never sit down to a college test that I’m not holding one hand over my stomach as cramps begin an hour before it and only subside that evening, only to start again with the next test.
Still, I have a deep well of stubbornness, which turns out to be useful. I like books, I just can’t read well. So I read and read and read. One of my favorites is Watership Down. It’s hard going, but life-altering experiences like identifying with the puny rabbit with a sixth sense are what keep me pushing and very gradually allow the act of moving my eyes over printed pages to become one of my greatest joys.
But I remain frustrated for years, watching as friends nail perfect SAT scores and big scholarships to expensive schools. My standardized test scores lag. It’s embarrassing.
My friends have firm plans to go to college. I envy them. Studying is painful, hard, and slow, but I want to go to college too. I’m chopping coleslaw at Granny’s Fried Chicken when my father says to me: “You can’t go to college. I’ve got three more kids after you. I can’t afford it. Don’t ask me again.”
We live in an unincorporated community called Macedonia, near the then equally small town of Canton, Georgia, which doesn’t have a movie cinema. We have well water. It’s soft on hair but bad on teeth. I love our neighbors Hoyt and Earcell, they raise chickens and garden, and let me ramble for hours over their rolling green pastures and woods whenever I am sad or bored or need to flee problems at home, walking miles with only the red-tailed hawks soaring overhead for company. But I itch to see more of the world.
Some teachers help me, and I do the work. Even though I see no progress. What else is there? Behind my father’s back, I apply to colleges, paying for the fees with money from my fast-food job, hoping scholarships will happen that will enable me to go to school; otherwise, I cannot go.
Miraculously they do. I choose the school that offers me the most money. It’s an award-winning liberal arts college offering small class sizes, each not over twenty students, and individual teacher attention for every student. The downside is it’s only two hours from my home in northwest Georgia, but it’s a start, a chance.
Once there, however, I feel awkward. I’m on academic and need-based scholarships and do work-study as a secretary to pay for the expensive books. I type for a professor while many classmates drive new cars. Kind teachers, friends who overlook my oddities, like the semester I wear blue bib overalls solidly, and my doggedness somehow see me through.
My sophomore year brings an unexpected freedom. My Cuban grandfather shoehorns people’s feet into espadrilles and brocades and Oxfords and boots and sneakers and more at a department store, and when he shoehorns enough pumps onto middle-aged women’s callused feet, flashes his mustachioed grin, and charms them into purchases with his enthusiasm, he’s able to buy his long-awaited Oldsmobile Delta 88, and gives me his ten-year-old, faded green Vega. I feel like I am driving a Cadillac. I’m so happy, I don’t care I must turn the AC off to go more than 10 mph up hills, or that it requires me to store quarts of oil in the back and chug in one or more every other time I fill up with gas, or that sometimes it belches heavy white smoke, sometimes black, causing one motorist to shake his fist at me through the fog.
When Ortega (the Vega) dies a few years later, I get a used, dark blue metallic Chevy Chevette hatchback. It looks how a car would if it were mimicking a sneeze, the tiny wheels especially. It, a teaching assistantship, suppers of tuna, canned mixed vegetables, baked potatoes, sometimes Ramen for variation, and not otherwise shopping, for my mother keeps making my dress clothes, carry me through grad school in Athens.