The United Nations of Families

My son's birthday was celebrated in D.C. at my in-law's, who delighted in being able to throw him a party for the first time in five years. My mother-in-law, the embodiment of the 'perfect' martyred mother, baked cupcakes, a cake, and then the bonanza--a cake shaped like a Volkswagen car. She invited my husband's cousin and his three kids along with her own first cousin's daughter and her two kids. Their small house soon filled with laughter and talk about people's health in between bites of the fried chicken I had helped fry that morning.

I looked outside, reveling in the perfect fall day, noticing the 6 kids, my son included, playing various destructive games that involved the immolation of an apple tree. What struck me about all of the kids was that each was the product of an interracial marriage. The three from my husband's cousin are half Bolivian, each of them calling me Tia instead of the customary aunt. The other two half Caucasian girls, their father the offspring of a Lutheran minister from Pasadena, California, were precocious in a way I found unsettling. Once you've spent any time with Black families, you quickly realize the color spectrum of Blackness, even among members of the same family. And nothing was more striking about the kids than the various shades of brown.

This color spectrum will play out in how each child will maneuver their identity as a Black American. No doubt for some, being Black will be all encompassing of their racial identity, the result of the roll of the dice of genes. For some of the others, whose hues may be lighter, their hair straighter, they will have to manage to feel their way in a world that is so quick to prejudge based on race. I always believed the world gets murkier when your looks belie your true identity. There is no more tragic figure than the 'mulatto,' able to pass in most situations, having listening to people freely expressing their racial attitudes. Anatole Broyard, a well respected literary critic for the New York Times and writer, who lived his life as a white man, his secret identity a well-known secret in the black community of intellectuals, left behind a legacy of secrets that his children are still trying to sort out. His children learned about his father's subterfuge from their mother upon his death, this cataclysmic secret having his children question every aspect of their father's role in their lives. Such is the murkiness of race and color in this world, even in the 21st century.

My son's cries of frustration, a result of his 'girl' cousins excluding him, soon overtook any of my pensive thoughts about the future of all of these kids. I had to console him, trying to explain that this was only the beginning of a lifetime where women will play some role in his emotional turmoil. Soon enough, the kids had found another object of their focus. And my son, the first time in his five years, got to blow out his candles, surrounded by the many shades of brown faces of one half of his family.