While I’m reading, a sentence will grab me and force me to stop. I pay tribute to other authors by sharing their Damn Fine Sentences with you. Then I recount a memory the words bring up for me. It’s about how books connect with your life.
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“… every favor came with enough strings attached to stage a puppet show.”
—Leigh Bardugo
--Six of Crows

Our fake fireplace aglow and fake fire-crackling sounds completing the illusion, we settled into our T.V. room to stream Carmen Jones. I looked forward to Harry Belafonte’s gravelly calypso singing voice, but when he opened his mouth, out came the sound of a white man. And Dorothy Dandridge, the lyrics came out a micro-second after her mouth shaped the words. The powers that be had dubbed in white voices for these two internationally acclaimed black singers.

How did director Otto Preminger present the deal to Dandridge and Belafonte? I’ll make you two colored singers into stars! But—you won’t sing. Your voices will be silenced, replaced by white ones. One more thing, the white voices will sing the way Oscar Hammerstein II thinks you people talk. “Dere’s a café on de corner.”

I plowed through an online form, annoyed at repeating the same information on form after form after form, a million times a week. Why couldn’t the world centralize this stuff once and for all? Why weren’t these corporations tied in to auto-fill? Why should I donate my vitals to plump up someone’s data base? I plugged in my name and address, checked Black, supplied phone number, copy-pasted my website url. Bla bla bla.
After finishing, I went back through to catch typos. Above the race/ethnicity list, I noticed the instruction: Select all that apply.

What?

All?

Offered an opportunity to be more than singular, I froze. All would provoke a smackdown for stepping out of my place. The one-drop rule insisted I wasn’t enough Not-Black to claim anything other than Black. But the tap of a key was a tiny gesture. Far from earth-shattering, this tap of a key would register less than symbolic on the Richter scale. Less than galled me.

All. I leaned in to the danger, finger poised.

Do it, Dawn.

I checked White.

Energy shot through my spine.

I checked American Indian.

My chest puffed out.

I grew bigger than myself, made whole by ghosts.

My great-grandmother on Mama’s side was white, an Irish immigrant who married a colored man. After she ran back to Ireland, no photos of her found their way into the family album. Great-grandmother disappeared. But her whiteness lived on.

Mama could have passed. That is, if she’d been plucked away from the gaggle of nappy-headed kids trailing behind her calling her Mama. And all of us nappy-headed kids were Mama's color, the Irish woman’s color. I knew too little about her to claim my great-grandmother. I failed to see her in any mirror, or when smoothing lotion onto legs many shades lighter than Africa. Besides my skin color, what other traits did she hand down to me? Maybe I’m outspoken, because she was. Maybe I laugh too loud, because she did. Maybe I cannot tell a joke to save my soul, because she couldn’t. Nameless and faceless, Great-grandmother was more theory, than relation. After I selected all that applied, I felt both her presence and her absence.

My paternal double-great-grandfather was Blackfoot Nation. Isaac Johnson’s image and story are familiar in our family. A Civil War veteran, he peers out from a photo wearing a 19th century suit that reminds me of Gunsmoke. The picture is faded, but clear enough to guess. The lips are not African, neither is the shiny black hair. Further driving home the validity of my cautious claim, photos of his grown daughter, Granny Mum (great-grandmother, Dad's side) make me disoriented. How can I be Black when Granny Mum looked like she’d just walked off the res? How could I be Black when Granny Mum’s features were so classic she looked fake? The cheekbones, The nose. Lips. The long braid down her back. I stopped looking at Granny Mum's picture, and my Black equilibrium returned. Close the family album, and I didn't feel Isaac Johnson or Granny Mum in me. After I selected all that applied, Isaac Johnson and Granny Mum filled my lungs with Blackfoot Nation air.

While writing Blindsided: Essays from the only Black Woman in the Room, I was absorbed in color as though there were only one. I analyzed my black experience. Searched for black people to be black with. My vision was myopic. Black, black, black. Squished and puny, I was unequal to the task of being me.

When I selected all that applied, the ancestors swooped in. Where you been girl? Stand up. We got you.

While I’m reading, a sentence will grab me and force me to stop. I pay tribute to other authors by sharing their Damn Fine Sentences with you. Then I recount a memory the words bring up for me. It’s about how books connect with your life.

*****

“There is nothing to fear from someone who shouts.”
———Chinua Achebe
——--Things Fall Apart

Our house filled up with uncles when I was a kid. It was confusing. Dad only had one brother, and Mama didn’t have any, but somehow I had enough uncles—all named Youlyingbastard—to fill up the living room. Or was it the kitchen. Between hollering, smoking, and cussing, my uncles would laugh so hard they knocked over tumblers of whatever it was that gave them stinky breath when they belched.

Cigarette smoke floated around the room like a cloud, fighting for space with the hot sticky air coming in through the open windows.

I could sit for hours listening to my uncles’ stories, trying to memorize them, so I could use them if I needed to make somebody laugh. But with all the knee-slapping and name calling, it was hard to catch all the details.

Like when somebody was waving their arms and yelling about the time that fool shot a hole in the fishing boat. After I went to bed, I wondered why they took a gun fishing, and did a gun really fit into a tackle box? So I paid closer attention when that story came around again. And I think maybe it was duck hunting when that fool shot a hole in the boat. Another time, after they shot a pheasant out of the sky, they sent that fool to retrieve the body, like he was one of the hound dogs. That’s what you did with a fool you didn’t want to come with you in the first place.

Before I could figure out if he came back with the pheasant or they left him behind, they were talking about Mamma Fannie walking across the Market Street Bridge (I guess she’d left her horse and buggy at home) the night a stranger came at her saying “I’m gonna get me some black … " something about a cat; it didn’t make any sense to me. Mamma Fannie said, “Come and get it.” She pulled out her gun, and that fool jumped off the bridge. After I went to bed it occurred to me Mamma Fannie lived before any of the uncles in the living room were even born. That fool survived the jump and then time-traveled to the future to mess up my uncles’ hunting trips.