Passionate Martyr

I remember my parents taking me to the Buster Brown Shoe Store when I was little, maybe four or five. It was in downtown Albany, probably on or near Central Avenue, and I’m not sure why they brought me there as usually my shoes were bought at the nearest big box discount store, not Wal-Mart back then, but similar.

The shoes we bought were Mary Jane’s, and they were for Easter. The salesman walked behind the counter to ring up the shoes, and he told me I could come on back and choose a plastic egg with pastel beads inside of it from the glass case beneath the counter.

I squealed, ran behind the counter, pulled out an egg with a clear top and blue bottom, and clutched it to my chest. My excitement and urgent determination made the salesman laugh, and I felt my cheeks warm, embarrassed that I had shared my emotions with a stranger.

Today, I’m that same person, shy of temperament but teeming with emotion. I can’t help but communicate it. When I speak or write about race, culture, injustice, and the human condition, I feel the urgency, and I want to share it in spite of my fear of strangers. Afterwards I feel different emotions: remorse for burdening others with our sometimes painful experiences; sadness that I cannot reach more people; hope that I’ve opened the eyes of even one person; frustration that change is slow; anxiety that I’ve revealed too much; desire for solitude; longing for connection; doubt feeding my insecurities; and fear roiling my insides.

If I listened to my fears, I would not have accomplished one thing in life. They scream at me. They predict failure, danger, and death.  I cover my ears, try to calm my breathing, focus only on the next moment in time, and keep going.

I used to tell myself that I could do anything temporarily, for seconds, then minutes, then longer, and that helped keep me going, too. I keep my goals in site: go to college even though neither parent graduated high school; don’t go back home where I feel abandoned and unloved; meet and marry a man whose race is different from mine and know this fact will cause many people to question my sanity, directly impact our life through racism (affecting our economic and quality of life opportunities), and socially spurn us; have children when others express the irresponsibility of bringing mixed race children into a racist society; choose to leave the comfort of academia and move into the corporate world to grow my career, contribute substantially to the family finances, and become well-known in my field as an expert, leader, and trainer; speak up and fight when injustice, racist actions, or prejudice affects our family or others; choose to be dissatisfied with middle-age weight gain, lose 50 pounds, and keep it off for over ten years; start a master’s degree at 45 and finish a second one at 53; move to another state where we know no one; and start a blog that relies on personal experience to talk about race, gender, and culture.

Every person has stories of triumph, failure, and moving through fear to obtain goals. I love hearing people’s stories. Usually within a short time of meeting people I’ve asked enough questions to learn what stories are important to them and define who they are.

In a marriage and family counseling class that I took during my first master’s degree, the professor asked us to introduce ourselves in a few sentences.  I said, “I live a multicultural and interracial life. I’m Italian and Irish-American. I bill myself as a passionate martyr.”

It was a nod to my interethnic upbringing and how it shaped my view of the world and my place in it.

My introduction caused many classmates to laugh. Pretty good for a woman who had a panic attack outside the classroom of the first counseling class I registered for a few years before then.  Back then I wondered why a middle-aged woman, secure in her career and job, would think about going back to school with students who were about the same age as my daughters. Could I contribute anything of value to the classroom discussions? I discovered I wanted to know more about myself, about our multicultural world, and about people in general, and this was one way to gain the skills to do that.

I am that passionate martyr.

(Excerpt from essay Creating a Cultural Context in American Memoir)

Many Americans are not aware they are surrounded by a cultural context that uniquely molds them and colors their perceptions of their experiences and of others. This is particularly true of white Americans. They may say, “I’m not ethnic, I’m white,” for example, but what does being “white” mean? Every individual has an ethnicity, the heritage and social/cultural customs, beliefs and values of a particular group, and has also been influenced dramatically by “social class, religion, migration, geography, gender oppression, racism, and sexual orientation, as well as family dynamics (McGoldrick, Giordano, Garcia-Preto, p.1).” Add personality and temperament to the mix, and no two people are exactly alike.

Every American came from somewhere else. Some traveled over a strait that connected the continents thousands of years ago. Others traveled to escape oppression in their home countries. Some were brought here by force. People settled in areas they felt comfortable in, maybe choosing to live with people like themselves, or near places of worship, or certain topographies that felt familiar, or a particular climate, or where the jobs were. Some people were forced to live on the plantations they labored at, or on reservations, or in urban ghettos, or in rural isolation. These circumstances created a cultural context in which people lived and developed and learned about themselves and others.

Monica McGoldrick emphasizes in her book, Ethnicity and Family Therapy, how important the legacy of migration is when she says, “All Americans have experienced the complex stresses of migration. And the hidden effects of this history, especially when it goes unacknowledged, may linger for many generations. Families’ migration experiences have a major influence on their cultural values (p.19).”

The legacy of ethnicity is passed from one generation to the next, sometimes clearly, as in speaking a native language or practicing traditions. Other ethnic clues are passed down subtly: maybe the turn of a phrase or an unattributed tenet or a story shared from one generation to the next. Sometimes traditions and language are lost over the generations, perhaps through forced or voluntary assimilation into a dominant culture or through physical distance from one’s origins.

Stereotypes are negative generalities that become internalized by the people they are about and by the people who construct them. Their intention is often to hurt, oppress and segregate ethnic or cultural groups. They may be grounded in a bit of truth, but their intent is dishonest and disingenuous.

But there are generalities about ethnicity, race, culture and gender that can enlighten and normalize. These generalities are never meant to define a person, because so many forces in life shape a unique individual, and each of us is unique. Yet knowing that a certain ethnicity or culture tends to think in similar ways, shares a common belief system and historical legacy, or acts in collective synergy, can lend understanding or the ability to step into the shoes of another and experience the world through his or her point of view. The more an individual can learn about the unique lens through which he or she views the world, the more such knowledge can engender tolerance for other perspectives and people and a better understanding about oneself.

McGoldrick describes stereotyping this way:

Although generalizing about groups has often been used to reinforce prejudices, one cannot discuss ethnic cultures without generalizing. The only alternative is to ignore this level of analysis of group patterns, which mystifies and disqualifies the experience of groups at the margins, perpetuating covert negative stereotyping, as does the failure to address culture explicitly per se, considering socioeconomic, political, and religious influences more important. Others avoid discussion of group characteristics altogether, in favor of individual family patterns maintaining, “I prefer to think of each family as unique” or “I prefer to think of family members as human beings rather than pigeonholing them in categories.” Of course, we all prefer to be treated as unique human beings. But such assumptions prevent us from acknowledging the influence of cultural and group history on every person’s experience (p. 13).

As a memoir writer, I think it is even more important to understand one’s cultural legacy. A memoirist is writing a particular story from a particular point of view and a particular perspective. The story is singularly unique yet it resonates beyond the writer.

I do not believe every story must be written from a cultural perspective, but acknowledging that it is one lens through which a life is experienced enriches the depth of story. For example, I was raised in a bicultural family. My father was a first generation Italian-American, and my mother was a war bride of Irish descent from Australia. Being raised in a family with recently immigrated parents definitely had an impact on how I experienced mainstream American culture. In fact I often felt on the fringes, an outsider, with many of my peers.  When I first began to study the ethnic tension in my home life, I did not account for the legacy that my Irish heritage contributed. I only thought about the cultural aspects of being Australian and Italian, but a deeper search revealed that my mother being Irish-Australian mattered just as much to my story.

When I read the following in McGoldrick’s book, Ethnicity and Family Therapy, as I studied toward a master’s degree in counseling, I felt a sense of understanding for my mother I had not experienced before:

The Irish people are a people of many paradoxes. While having a tremendous flair for bravado, they may inwardly assume that anything that goes wrong is the result of their sins. They are dreamers but also pragmatic, hard workers… They are good humored, charming, hospitable, and gregarious, but often avoid intimacy. They love a good time, which includes teasing, verbal word play, and sparring, yet are drawn to tragedy. Although always joking, they seem to struggle continuously against loneliness, depression, and silence, believing intensely that life will break your heart one day (p. 595).

This simple paragraph, perhaps feeling stereotypical to some, felt as if it were specifically talking about my mother.

When my husband and I met freshman year of college, a new cultural and racial construct contributed to the perspective through which I view the world. My husband is African-American. His family is descended from Africans brought here against their will to be used as slaves. It’s important to note that his historical legacy sets him apart from African-Americans who immigrated to the US by choice, and how new they are generationally to the US. His family also migrated from the South to the North. This had a cultural impact as well. Interracial marriage, though more common, is still statistically rare. “Factoring in all racial combinations, Stanford University sociologist Michael Rosenfeld calculates that more than 7 percent of America’s 59 million married couples in 2005 were interracial, compared to less than 2 percent in 1970.”^[1]

McGoldrick has this to say about intermarriage:

Although, as a nation, we have a long history of intercultural relationships, until 1967 our society explicitly forbade racial intermarriage, and discouraged cultural intermarriage as well, because it challenged White supremacy. But traditional ethnic and racial categories are now increasingly being challenged by the cultural and racial mixing that has been a long submerged part of our history. Intimate relationships between people of different ethnic, religious, and racial backgrounds offer convincing evidence that Americans’ tolerance of cultural differences may be much higher than most people think (p. 26).

She goes on to say, “Couples who choose to ‘marry out’ are usually seeking to rebalance their own ethnic characteristics, moving away from some values as well as toward others (p. 27).”

When we had children, we created yet another cultural, racial and ethnic dynamic. My daughters straddle race and culture in a way neither my husband nor I ever could.

---

[1] After 40 Years, Interracial Marriages Flourishing, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18090277/ns/us_news-life

Demographic Evolution

For many centuries, when it was discovered that there were other lands beyond their own, people explored, traded goods and ideas, and adopted new words into their languages. Sometimes they conquered nations and ruled over them. Sometimes they enslaved the people. Other times they engaged in genocide.

Perhaps the concept of exploration and all the good and bad it embodied was needed for mankind to evolve. Now we are a global community. Progress is rapid and ideas, trends, and news are communicated in seconds. We are connected through technology and the ease of travel.

Cultures are becoming more common than different in industrialized nations, but regional and local cultural mores still operate. In such a world, I think it only matters what personal tastes an individual has in terms of where s/he wants to live, work, and socialize, but I suffer idealism.

This week on ABCNews.com I read an article about the shifting demographic in America. No doubt we knew a shift was coming. The Hispanic population has boomed, while middle class white people are aging, have been shrinking as a group, and have fewer children. Blacks remain at around twelve percent of the population, and Asians, also growing in number, are at around five percent of the total population.

The article, found here, http://abcnews.go.com/US/militias-hate-groups-grow-response-minority-population-boom/story?id=16370136#.T7epWhzeeuR, and titled “Hate Groups Grow as Racial Tipping Point Changes Demographics” states, “The data released this week revealed a tipping point in the country's demographic shift. For the first time in the country's history, more minority children were born than white children, setting the stage for an eventual non-white majority in America's population.”

This trend caused a growth in hate groups around the country. Their growth spiked in 2008 when President Obama was elected and continues to grow rapidly. Even white people who don’t consider themselves racist express fear about the changes in population. Mark Potok, spokesman for the Southern Poverty Law Center, said, “It's a generalized feeling that 'this is not the country my Christian white forefathers built. We've got to take this country back.' It's not rancid straight ahead race hate, but it is very closely tied to race and the changing look of the country."

It’s an odd anxiety in my opinion, especially because of how this country was settled. First there was genocide and the stealing of land from the native people. Then slaves were brought from Africa when it was deemed Native Americans were not hearty enough to be enslaved. Then after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the dearth of people willing to pick crops and work for low wages in the service of others caused an influx of illegal immigrants. Corporate farmers and the wealthy looking for cheap household help brought them into the country first, then others followed, both legal and illegal, looking for opportunity. Now whites are anxious that the country they considered their home and playground is changing, and they are losing their power to control the situation. It reminds me of the constant feeling that must have run rampant in the South, at the height of slavery, that there were many more blacks than wealthy whites, and if the slaves were ever able to organize, a way of life might be lost. Many of the racist fears that still haunt black men today, like the belief that they have strong sexual desires for white women, grew out of that time. Of course, other historical events and economic trends ended that way of life, but the fear remains.

America doesn’t belong to just white people. It belongs to all Americans of every race and ethnicity. And our culture shows it. The food we eat, the music we listen to, the way we dance: they are all multicultural. Jazz, the blues, Rap, and Zydeco are all uniquely American as is modern dance, tap dance and Hip Hop.  Now Salsa is popular and many businesses display bilingual signage. We are a predominately Christian culture, but we’ve been influenced by many world religions. The popularity of yoga and meditation is an example of how we’ve been influenced by eastern religions and philosophies.

America is an interesting experiment in the merging of world cultures. It makes us unique and influential around the world. I can’t see how that can make people anxious, yet it is ever present.

I’m of Italian and Irish descent with a sprinkle of English and a large dollop of Australian. I’ve spent my adulthood in an interracial relationship with my husband who is black and Seminole Indian. My daughters are interracial –we often told people they were international babies whenever we were asked, “What are they?”  I have always lived a multicultural life. I haven’t chosen one culture or ethnicity over another or felt pressured to. I’ve enjoyed learning that there are different perspectives in the world and have let them open my mind, not close it. My husband is the same way. We’ve always been open to knowing people different than ourselves. That’s how we got together. My daughters feel the same way, too. They use all their cultural influences when creating art, music, dance and theater.

In the article on hate groups, Potok said that younger generations are more accepting of the demographic changes in America. He said 95 percent of them are accepting of interracial relationships. It’s a sign that race is not an important social construct to them. In just a few generations, maybe the color of one’s skin will be unimportant. We will have the chance to enjoy the uniqueness of our global culture instead of fighting over who is American due to race entitlement and who is not due to race prejudice and oppression. Just as cultures and mankind evolved for thousands of years through exploration, we are undergoing another evolution. I can only hope it will happen in my lifetime.

Parenting Creativity

I had conversations with each of my daughters this week about their artistic pursuits. I originally wrote that sentence by describing the conversations as “nice” but that isn’t accurate. They were conversations about struggle, frustration, the process of sharing work and passion, and how hard it is to be an artist of any kind. We spoke about how an artist’s work is affected by where you present your work and who sees it. They’ve watched their own parents struggle with this as well and witnessed our feelings of failure and lack of personal satisfaction. There has been growth, but if it is only internal or only at home with no audience in sight, there is a sense of incompleteness about the process.

I’ve felt my own love/hate relationship with my creativity. As a writer and a daydreamer, my creativity isolates me. Yet I feel the urge to share my writing and then oftentimes end up disappointed by rejection (one agent told me to rewrite and “tell me how you feel.” Isn’t that the clichéd counselor’s exhortation?) or arguments (family and friends telling me what I experienced and how I perceived that experience is incorrect). That’s hard to take because it is my story, my memory, my vision, my perception, and my expression of what happened and how I processed it. The feeling is innate in the telling and the choices made during that telling.

Then I think of my husband, the most creative, sensitive, and artistic person I know. He’s been a successful artist. He’s led bands and recorded music.  He is driven to try repeatedly to collaborate but each time he feels that disappointment, the failure of not reaching a shared vision, his sense that others don’t have or want the same intensity of experience, and there he is, a musician left alone with his instrument. He has told Cara and Mackenzie time and again, “Do your own thing. Don’t wait or rely on others.”

One other thing he tells them, that I agree with and often repeat, is, “Amateurs help amateurs remain amateurs.”

Cara had her own bit of wisdom to impart today, to me, her mother. I told her I was rereading my memoir, going over it again, reading it out loud, and looking for weaknesses in the structure and the writing. I said, “I’m not liking it now. I think the second half is complicated.”

“Mom,” she said. “Don’t over edit. You’ll ruin it.”

 I know that. She’s right. My story is braided and complicated. That’s how my brain perceives things, too. It wouldn’t be my story if I edited that out. I saw that as I finished reading the last few pages of the memoir out loud an hour or so ago. It’s authentic and true to who I am and the story I’ve chosen to tell about me in all its complexity. It’s not a story about just race and racism; it’s a story about two creative, imperfect people who feel the impact of differentness in a racially constructed world.

We need that differentness that we bring to the creative process, else it would just be the same artistic product over and over, like thousands of same model cars made on the assembly line.  Some are blue, some are silver, and some are black, red or white, but they are the same damn car. There would be no individuality, no authentic emotional exchange, no true sharing of culture, spirit and humanity.

Mainstream culture embraces the car theory of artistic pursuit. Find a good artist that appeals to the masses; then duplicate him or her until the masses tire and want something else. Artists don’t choose to be tragic figures, but I understand how many end up that way.

Nurture your creativity. Accept its differentness. And when it grows mature and it gives you good advice, be open to it. That’s good parenting.

(Excerpt from essay Mother Mother)

I had a terrible fight with Ma when I was fourteen. I hung out with a group of girls, all living middle class lives. They spent their weekly allowances at the mall and bought T-shirts, Snoopy and Mickey Mouse stickers, Tiger Beat, a fan magazine, and 45s with hits by David Cassidy and Bobby Sherman. I didn’t get an allowance. Ma and Dad couldn’t afford to give me one, and our house looked nothing like their houses. It was cluttered, dusty, and greasy with worn-out furniture and raveling rugs covered in animal fur over asbestos tiled floors. A film of cigarette smoke blanketed every surface.

My newfound friends enjoyed ice-skating at the tennis courts on Locust Park. Just three blocks from my house, the tennis courts were flooded each winter by the village and the skating was free. The girls kept asking when I was going to come, and I wanted to go so I would not be left out or forgotten. They had already expressed their displeasure at my eccentric behavior when I spent a sleepover at one of their houses hunkered down in the corner with the novel Knock on Any Door, by Willard Motley. They couldn’t understand how an old, moldy paperback with a torn cover, taken from Ma’s bookshelf, could possibly be more interesting than looking at a centerfold of David Cassidy in the latest Tiger Beat issue.  But I found Nick “live fast, die young, and have a good looking corpse” Romano much more intriguing. I couldn’t put the book down.

I asked Ma for ice skates, and she wandered into the cellar and pulled out a musty pair of skates from beneath a pile of junk. Peggy had used them a decade or so before. The leather was cracked and brittle, and they smelled bad. I hated them in comparison to the other girls’ brand new skates. When I put them on, the other girls sneered and said they were ugly. I had not skated before, and my ankles leaned inward and grew sore and tired within a short time. I struggled to hold back my tears and formulated my plan for getting new skates.

When I got home, I started crying. I told Ma how my ankles hurt from wearing the old skates and how much I needed a new pair. Ma lashed out at me, saying the kinds of things I was used to hearing like how selfish I was. I lashed back. Then I ran into my room, and sobbed for all I stood to lose by not having those skates.  In a few minutes, as I choked and blubbered, Ma came into my room, sat on the edge of the bed, hugged me, and said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize how much the skates meant to you. I’ll find a way.”

My victory felt shallow and tarnished, but I got my skates the next day. I know now that Ma had no money for skates and was more worried about putting food on the table. And she was right I was selfish. The minute I had those new skates on, though, I forgot about it. My ankles still sagged inward and hurt, but my skates were shiny and new.

I made sure, even if I went into debt, that Cara and Mackenzie never suffered my shame. It caused fights between Ronald and me as my store credit cards hit their limits, but I never wanted them to feel unworthy. In principal I didn’t allow them to wear the more expensive popular brands that many of the middle class kids wore. It was my way of keeping them grounded, and I reminded them how some of the other kids they went to school with might never have a new winter jacket or a warm pair of boots. Each year we donated clothes they had outgrown to the school nurse, so she could give them to students who needed them. I explained that their old winter jacket would become someone else’s new jacket and that if they saw someone wearing something that used to be theirs, they should never mention it. That’s how parenting is done sometimes, as a correction of the past. It doesn’t make it better or even right, but it happens just the same.

The Face of America

If I asked you to imagine an American, what would the person look like? Do you see President Obama as the face of America? Oprah Winfrey? Tiger Woods?  Jennifer Lopez? Marc Anthony? For many people, the face they’d envision would be a white face, probably a man, someone of European descent. Yet the 2010 Census shows ethnic minorities are growing. The Hispanic population grew 43 percent since the 2000 Census. Hispanics constitute 16 percent of the US population. The Asian population also grew by 43 percent, and they represent 5 percent of the US population. African-Americans represent 13 percent of the US population. Nine million people, or about 3 percent of the population reported being more than one race, or mixed race.

Texas, California, the District of Columbia, Hawaii and New Mexico are states in which there is a majority-minority population, where more than 50 percent of the population reported being from a minority group.

Yet most people still picture Americans as white. White is more of a mindset, a social construct related to power and privilege, than a race or ethnicity. Many white Americans don’t feel culturally connected to their countries of origin.  Mainstream culture, though often influenced by the cultures of ethnic minorities, is often assigned “whiteness.” Yet many things uniquely American were originated within ethnic minority cultures in America – jazz and tap dance are the most well-known examples.

Some people are calling for a colorblind society, and I hope for it as well, for an acceptance of everything and everybody that we are in America. It is a different way of viewing the concept of the melting pot. Initially it was thought immigrants would assimilate into mainstream culture. But the new, progressive view of the melting pot could be the sharing, acceptance and acknowledgement of all the cultures that contribute to making mainstream American culture unique.

We are not there, though there have been attempts – the multicultural movement in the 1980s and 1990s, for example. Unfortunately, terms such as multicultural and diversity were often used incorrectly, only in reference to ethnic minorities. It was misunderstood that we are all ethnic and that is what makes us diverse, each one of us. Even for individuals who came from family that has multiple generations in America, their family origins were passed down to them through the food they eat, the legacy of migration or immigration, the stories they pass on to the next generation, the traditions they keep, and the way they celebrate holidays and rites of passage.

Until we recognize and acknowledge that each American has an ethnic origin, that the concept of white or black or brown skin is a social construct and has little to do with race, culture and ethnicity, we cannot live in a colorblind society. At this time in our history, colorblindness will mask the very real racism that is woven into the fabric of who we are. It is a part of our history, our institutions, and our collective sense of identity. Are you in touch with your ethnicity? Who do you picture as the face of America?

(Excerpt from Chapter 5, Why You Gotta Be Jerkin’? Shades of Tolerance: A Biracial Love Story)

Dad looked gray, and he sat quietly in his chair. He laid the newspaper on the floor in front of him, and held his chest as he leaned over and read, just as he had when he had his first heart attack. This time he did not wait the entire weekend to go to the doctor.

Frank drove us to see Dad in the intensive care unit. I sat in a chair by the window, the sun falling on my hair, lighting it up like a red flame. Ma always told me she thought I would be the one to have red hair; she hoped for it, for a child that looked more Irish than Italian. But I was not that child.

I did not know what to say to Dad as he lay in the bed with tubes and wires connected to him. I could not think of anything to make him feel better. The hospital smells and the beeping of the heart monitor made me anxious.

“Your hair is red,” Dad said, “You dyed it, didn’t you?”

“No, it’s just the sun,” I said.

“Yes, you did. I can tell,” he said, laughing a little, but I knew he was upset.

“It’s the sun, Dad. If I move, you’ll see. I haven’t touched my hair.”

I stood up and moved to the end of the bed, away from the sun, so he could be sure.

I called Ronald the next day from work on the Watts line.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“No,” I said. I wanted to run back to Syracuse.

Ma started in on me minutes after Steve dropped me at home that evening.

“You were my princess,” she said.

“What?”

“I had every hope for you,” she said.

“Ma, I don’t want to talk about this.”

“You caused your father’s heart attack. You might have killed him.”

I stopped breathing. The room swirled around me.

“Ma, don’t say that!”

“You’ve thrown your life away!”

“Stop, Ma, just stop!”

“You’ve broken my heart! I want to die!”

“Ma, why do I have to choose? I’m happy. I love him!”

“Your children will be hated. You’ll be ostracized. My princess,” Ma said. She moaned. She began to sob, and I joined her. “Aunt Josephine cut you out of her will,” she continued.

“So what?” I said, “What’s that supposed to do? How would that change my mind?”

“You’ve cut yourself off.”

“Ma, what if I choose you?” I said, the words thick in my throat, “You won’t be here forever. You’ll leave me alone.”

I cried. Ma bawled. I pleaded. Ma accused.

The next morning, with no sleep, I showered, dressed, ate some breakfast, and left the house at 11:15. My eyes were swollen and dry – I had no tears left. I walked down Locust Park toward Central Avenue to the bus stop.

Steve pulled up beside me in his brown Pinto.

“Hey,” he called out the window.

“I feel like shit,” I said, “Ma and I fought all night.”

“Over Ron again?”

“Yes, I don’t have time to tell you about it. I’ll tell you later.”

“Want a ride?”

“No, I need to walk,” I said. He waved and drove off.

Steve drove me back to school that fall. We stopped at Peggy and Dawson’s house to visit her before Steve headed back to Albany. After her daughter Liza was born, we had found our way back to each other. I often babysat Liza at the dorm, letting all the girls on the floor dote over her as she played peek-a-boo with me in the mirror, her large, azure blue eyes with the dark ring around the irises surprising her reflection, her blond hair falling in sweet baby curls. I felt about Liza the way I imagined Peggy felt about me when I was little.

I told Peggy about my many arguments with Ma, about how difficult it was to see Dad in the hospital again, and how hard the whole summer had been.  I had been berated and chafed every day to make a choice.

“So maybe you should just stop talking to her,” she said, “then she’ll have to choose if she wants to lose you or be in your life with Ron as part of it.”

“How could I do that?” I asked.

“You just have to,” she said, “When they come up, I’ll have you and Ron over, so she can get to know him. That might make a difference.”

“It won’t,” I said, “She won’t change her mind.”

“She might. But either way, you have to be strong and live your life,” she said, hugging me, and I remembered how she took care of me when Ma couldn’t or didn’t.

I stopped talking to Ma. 

Excerpt from Shades of Tolerance Chapter 2 Bloody Mick

My sister Peggy, the oldest of the five Liuzzi children, was ten years old when I was born. Peggy recently told me she quickly realized Ma had no interest in taking care of me. She thought maybe Ma was overwhelmed or too tired, so she stepped in and made sure I was fed and changed. For the next eight years, she was more a mother than Ma. She would enter my life again when I most needed her as a teenager in an interracial relationship.

I was four when Peggy lost me, or, should I say, we lost track of one another.  Had I paid attention, I would have been right at her side. It was 1961, and she doesn’t recall the incident. Yet the panic and fear of those few minutes stayed with me.

The family was at Thatcher State Park, just outside of Albany, on a summer day. Peggy, tall in my eyes, with ash brown hair, hazel eyes behind cat’s eye glasses, pale skin and freckles across her nose, held my hand and took me over to a food stand to buy small cups of soda. She let go of my hand to carry the sodas back to our picnic table. Without her hand to guide me, I did not follow her. I stood in the crowd of shorts and skirt-covered legs and sandaled feet, overwhelmed by the size and number of adults. I grabbed a hand.

“Oh, my. Whom do you belong to?”

It was a lady’s voice, but not one I knew, and I was too shy to speak. I looked up at her. Her face seemed far away, and her cheeks, rosy with circles of blush, seemed to slide toward her chin as she looked down at me. Her Jackie O. sunglasses hid her eyes, making her seem alien and frightening.

“Where’s your mother?” she asked. I thought she sounded angry. I still held her hand. I pointed toward the picnic tables. “Let’s walk that way and see if we can find her.”

“There you are,” Peggy said, marching over and grabbing my hand. “Thank you. She didn’t follow me back from the stand.”

“Keep an eye on her,” the woman said, turning and walking back to her group of picnickers.

A nightmare haunted me after that incident. We were at Thatcher Park and Ma was calling me because it was time to go home. She stood under a large oak tree in her short-sleeved black dress with the white collar and white buttons on the bodice and sleeve caps, her silhouette all breasts and belly. I ran over, and she grabbed me. She pulled her face off, and underneath was her true face, that of a witch with a long crooked nose and craggy, green skin. I screamed. She took me back to her cave. Her longhaired scarecrow husband, dressed in denim overalls and a red and white plaid flannel shirt, sat cross-legged before a fire pit. A tin plate of food balanced on his knee. 

“Good stuff,” he said while chewing.

I stared, and the witch cackled.

“That’s your little brother. Now I’ll cook you for my dinner.”

She picked me up and held me over the fire pit. I kicked and screamed with all my might, and the flames licked my Keds.

But that was how it was with Ma and me. I always thought she regarded me as if I were covered in pricklers; and I always regarded her as the mother in my dream who devoured her young.

Peggy was born on November 4, 1947. Frank came two years later on October 4, 1949. He was chubby when he was young and drank skim milk instead of whole. His ears stuck out from the sides of his head, made worse, Ma said, because he wore a cowboy hat crushed down over his ears for the first six or seven years of his life.  I had a hard time pronouncing his name when I was little, something about the ‘f’ and ‘r’ troubled me, and I called him Winko.

Rocco was born five years later on Frank’s birthday in 1954. “Take him back,” Frank told my mother, “he’s not what I asked for.” Rocco was the baby Ma said she almost died having. He was the largest baby, and I always imagined he was too heavy to stay inside her tummy. She told the doctor at delivery that if he had to choose, he should save the baby. Ma had a sweet spot in her heart for Rocco, letting him put his feet in her lap so she could rub them. He was a child of few words but he knew how to use a pencil and drew for hours a day. His nose was broad and flat, and Ma said he was part Aborigine. I imagine Ma liked how the word Aborigine rolled off her tongue and how it caused any neighbor or stranger to whom she mentioned it to stare at her with wide eyes and open mouths. But I liked believing Rocco was part Aborigine, and when I was in elementary school, I announced it whenever I could fit it into conversation.

 I was born three years later on May 30, 1957 at 5:30 a.m. Ma’s abdominal muscles were so stretched by the time I came along that I languished sideways in her womb. The nurses piled rolled blankets at her sides to coax me down into the birth canal headfirst. Hearing Ma tell the story of my birth, I believed my turning headfirst into the birth canal was the first of many times in my life that I would do my best to please others. But there was no pleasing Ma, no offers to rub my feet, and I stopped trying early on. Princess was not a word she had used to describe me before the day she learned I was in love with a black man.

Andy was born one month before my fourth birthday on April 29, 1961. I remember Ma pregnant with Andy. I kicked her in the stomach while she washed my hair at the kitchen sink, her baby-filled tummy pressed against me, and she left a red handprint on my shoulder blade where she slapped me.