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TONI MORRISON'S short story "Sweetness"
🕑 Added 2022-02-21 21:30:29 +0000 UTCMaybe a week or more ago I saved an image of a baby who I wanted to draw, and this was unusual since I don't think that I have much drawn babies other than my own kid when they were first born. I remember selling the first painting I did of them, which was called "Fire Rat" because that is their Chinese astrological sign and it was a close-up of them crying in my arm, and all of my arm you could see was about as much as in this drawing. Otherwise, I did plenty of joyful drawings, as did they of the two of us (I am including here Imogen's assigned Etch-a-Sketch drawing in preschool when asked to make a portrait of them and their mother).
As I started drawing this baby, not more than an hour ago, I turned on the radio, thinking I was getting NPR's "Press Play" but since it's the Presidents Day holiday, they had a special of readers doing Toni Morrison's work. I happened to tune in when Phylicia Rashad was reading the short story "Sweetness" in first person POV from a light-skinned mother who gave birth to a dark-skinned baby-- "Sudanese black" she called her-- and about her fear and dread and loathing of this baby. It was a shocking emotional piece to listen to while drawing a baby, and made me think about this essay I wrote for Essence magazine about how when out-and-about pushing my baby in a stroller in the streets of New York, where they were born, how white people assumed I was their nanny because I am dark-skinned and they were so lightskinned. If their white father pushed the stroller and I accompanied the two of them, people still thought I was the nanny being brought along for when he couldn't handle his baby. The stunning amount of racism I experienced in New York during the seven years I lived there I don't think can compare to what I experience here in L.A., which perhaps I know how to navigate since I was born here. And we only lived in New York for two years, once they were born, largely because I got sick of everyone assuming I was not their mother but their nanny. When that piece ran in Essence, I got so many letters from Black women who were mothers of biracial children and who had experienced the same, all mainly on the East Coast. On the west coast, during our visits home to family, there was no one in the street or wherever we went that didn't recognize that I was my baby's mother.
I spent the morning, as I did the weekend, going over the English edit version of The Passenger California book, which came out in Italian last week (I have no idea what edits they made since I don't know Italian) and the Brit who is editing for Europa Editions, asked if we shouldn't spell out BIPOC since Europeans wouldn't know what it is, and I said, let's leave it because they can Google it. We exchanged pleasantries this morning too, none of this was hostile, it's just that sometimes dealing with issues of race feels like a bummer on a Monday morning.
Sending you all my LOVE.
