The Journey Within: Part 6

Posted on January 29, 2010
Filed Under Journey | 20 Comments

I watched carefully as Mrs. Haynes paced across the room, stopping only momentarily to write something on the blackboard without losing her train of thought. She was tall, slightly heavy, and her hips swung in a silent rhythm as she moved passed each student’s desk. Her hair was a short bob of tightly wrung curls painted with silver streaks. I loved the way she spoke. There was a depth in her voice, matched with confidence in her delivery, and a soft grace in the approach she took with her class. Even the slight lisp that hung to her tongue had its own character, sometimes finding its way out as she spoke full sentences, and sometimes between her words. I listened as Mrs. Haynes talked about our history assignment that was due in a few weeks. Everything in Germany was so new to me. I still couldn’t believe I was in middle school as a sixth grader, whereas back home, 7th and 8th grade was considered junior high. Changing classes, multiple homework assignments, it was a lot to take in, not to mention all the new people I was meeting and befriending. I reached for my pen to jot down a few details of the assignment when a rapid fire of thoughts shot through my head. I looked up from my notebook, and my eyes focused in on Mrs. Haynes’ face, like a camera lens narrowing in around its subject. Suddenly it occurred to me that Mrs. Haynes was black. And I had never had a black teacher before.

I pressed the tip of my pen to the paper I was writing on, and a pool of ink spread out from beneath it creating a ripple of royal blue. I dug through my thoughts that were spinning like a Rolodex trying to remember every teacher I had. In preschool and kindergarten, my teachers were white. In elementary school, I had Japanese teachers, but that was the extent of the minority educators in our school. I made a mental list of my teachers starting from first grade. Mrs. Peri, Mrs. Stallings, Mrs. Delgado. White. Mrs. Shaffer, Mrs. Sherill, Mrs. Ginsberg. White. The school nurse? White. The principal? White. What about the women who worked in the front office? They were white too. What about my P.E. Teachers, Mr. Comar and Mrs. Winterstein whom I seriously disliked all through elementary school?  Both.White. I only knew one black woman in the whole school, and she was the custodian. When the bell rang, I grabbed my things, and smiled to myself, a feeling of pride coming over me.

I had a black teacher, and this was definitely worth writing home about.

***
It was Oct. 17, 1994, one day after my 11th birthday, that my family moved to Germany. We spent a few months in Frankfurt, and the remainder of our three years in Wiesbaden, one of the most beloved places to my heart. My dad has worked for the U.S. Government for nearly 30 years, and has traveled to U.S. Military bases all over the world for business. When we moved to Saudi Arabia as a family when I was a kid, we lived in a U.S. Military compound, and when we moved to Germany, again we went as Americans stationed overseas on official business. We were really lucky to have been given the opportunity to live off-base, which meant that our neighbors weren’t American. Most of them were German, and a few were Turkish, and some of my greatest memories of Germany are of our tiny little neighborhood called Delkenheim; the playground, our German landlords, the community marketplace, playing kickball with the local kids in a sand-and-dust-covered baseball field. Every morning, we’d see the German women leaning on their windowsills, arms folded over the down comforters they were airing out from the previous night. We always waved to them on our walk to the bus stop, and they always waved back. Uzma and I went to the Department of Defense Dependent Schools (or DODDS) which meant that 99 percent of the students were also American. They came from all over the U.S., and nearly every state was represented in our colorful little school. Non-American students were allowed to enroll, too, but their parents had to pay a high yearly fee to get them in. And even then, the non-American kids didn’t have access to the American grocery stores and shopping malls the way we did, which in many ways alienated them from the rest of us. About 97 percent of the families in Germany were active-duty military, and with more than half of enlisted military personal being minorities, we were in for quite the cultural shock when we first arrived.

***
I grew up in a middle class, white suburban area, and I can count on one hand the number of non-white children that were in my entire elementary school. I don’t think kids are ever really aware of the color of a person’s skin until they get a little bit older, and I can’t remember a time in my life when I noticed what color someone was – or even what color I was. But I remember somewhere around 5th grade that I started to notice the distinctions between the people in my group of friends. One afternoon, we had to run the universally dreaded Mile in gym class. After our run outside, all the girls raced to the bathroom before it was time to head back to class. My group of friends and I huddled together around one sink, fixing our hair, and splashing cold water on our faces when I noticed that all their faces were flushed pink from the run. Their skin was the color of bubblegum, but mine wasn’t. My skin had taken on a deeper pink, like the mauve colored gloss my mom used to glide across her lips before parties. The droplets of sweat that sprouted from my hairline lifted the small baby hairs that had been neatly pulled back into a ponytail when I left my house that morning – and I noticed that my skin was olive – something I had never seen until that day. I wondered if my friends had seen it. It seemed unlikely. But all that changed when we moved to Germany. There, everyone noticed the color of your skin, and wanted to know more. While switching periods one afternoon, one of the students in my grade called to me from the balcony of the 8th-grade staircase, and asked me where I was from.

“Virginia,” I said.

“No,” she replied. “I mean where are you from?”

Confused, I said ‘Virginia’ again.

“Close to D.C.” I said, in an attempt to be more specific.

She laughed.

“Girl, I mean why is your skin brown.”

My skin is brown?
Maybe she wants to know where my parents are from.

“Well, my mom is from India, and my dad is from Pakistan,” I said.

“So you’re half Indian and half from Pakistan?” she asked.

I guess so. I had never thought about it that way.

“Uh, yeah,” I said.

“So, you’re mixed?”

“Well India and Pakistan are sort of the same,” I said, internally hearing the echo of my dad’s voice scolding me for saying such a thing.

“That’s cool,”  she said. “A lot of people are going to ask you where you’re from since you’re new, and  Virginia is not the right answer.”

She smiled, and raced off to class. From that day forward, I became acutely aware of the fact that I was…Bi-racial? Brown skinned? A minority? I had never been in a place where the color of my skin played an integral role in how my peers would define me. I wasn’t exactly sure what to make of it.
Whatever this meant, whomever I was, I had to remember, Virginia was not the right answer.

***

Everything at our school in Germany was different from back home – the fashions, the hairstyles, the way people spoke. On the weekends, I wrote letters to my best friends back home; Tina, Laura, and Kathryn. But in school, I would eat lunch with my new best friends, Laquana, Tenisha, and Deshauna. Because we were immersed in this new culture for more than 80 percent of our day, it only took a few months before Uzma and I, naturally, became products of our environment. For the next three years, I wore excessive amounts of gel in my hair, plastering strands of locks to the side of my face, arranging them in crop circle-like patterns. I’d use a quarter-inch curling iron to create tiny candy curls that sprung from my ponytail, and fell into my face. I loved me some black-girl hair, and the way it could be styled seemingly at will. At home, Uzma’s and my bathroom was filled with “ethnic” hair care products. My dad showed a little bit of concern at times, likely because his daughters were turning into wannabe gangsters, sucking on pacifiers. My parents never talked to us about racial issues, or even acknowledged that they saw a change in us until one afternoon when they came to pick me up from a friend’s birthday party.

“It was so much fun,” I said climbing into the car. “It was cool because it wasn’t at her house. We was all down in the basement because you can use it as a party room, and …”

“What?” my dad interrupted. “We, what?”

“I said the party wasn’t at her house,” I continued. “We was all down in the basement…”

“We, WHAT?” my dad said noticeably irritated.

“We WAS.” I snapped back, mutually irritated that he wouldn’t let me finish my story.

“It’s we WERE,” he said.

“We was is not proper English,” my mom, the language arts teacher with the masters degree in English, chimed in from the passenger’s seat.

It was silent in the car for a few seconds when my dad took the liberty to call a family meeting right there in the car. Uzma and I always thought the basement was bad, but a car ride was worse. You’re only way out is to jump from a moving vehicle, which could mean a near-certain death.

As in, DEATH was the only way to get out of this one.

“Beta,” he said. “Uzma, you too. I need to ask you girls something, and I want an honest answer.”

Uzma and I looked at each other in the back seat. We had no idea where this was going.

“Have either of you ever said The N-Word?”

WHAT? If by “The N-Word” he was referring to what I thought he was referring to…

“The WHAT?” Uzma gasped.

We looked at each other in absolute embarrassment, shock, horror, and confusion, trying our best not to laugh.

“You know,” my dad said. “The N-Word.”

“No!” Uzma gasped. “We would never say that.”

“Dad, we’re not even black,” I said.

“I’m glad you realize that,” he said. “I see how you guys are being influenced by the culture around you, and that’s natural because you are young. That’s going to happen. It happens to me too when I’m at work. I find myself talking, or acting like the group of people I associate with. But I want you both to know that there is a fine line when it comes to certain words that other people use.”

We stayed quiet, and he continued.

“I’ve noticed that ever since we moved here you girls have started acting different, talking different, dressing different, and even your hairstyles have changed,” he said. “I realize that we’re in a different environment now than we were back home, but you girls have to understand that – that word – The N-Word is not something that is EVER okay to say. Kapish?”

My dad had a habit of hitting us with Uncle Jesse’s catch phrase when he wanted to make sure we got his drift. And this was a serious ‘Kapish,’ which meant that Uzma and I couldn’t let on to the laughter bubbling up inside of us. I was covered with a blanket of embarrassment, and it was moments like these when I, the tween, wanted to curl up and die.
But only after I applied grease to my scalp and wrapped my hair in a scarf.

***

For the next three years, who I was became somewhat of an explanation that I had little knowledge of when I gave. The summer before I started 7th grade, my family took a trip to India, and I was very excited to meet my roots. We stepped off the plane in Bombay, and I remember the feeling of suffocation that came over me the first time I took a breath of Indian air. It was hot, humid, muggy, and too thick to swallow. In a moment of sheer panic, I turned to get back on the plane so I could take a deep breath, but my mom grabbed hold of me and said it would only take a few minutes to get used to. A driver was sent to pick us up from the airport so we could catch another flight to Hyderabad, known as the “City of Pearls,” which is where my mom grew up. As we drove to the other airport, I remember seeing the streets lined with some of the most impoverished people in the world. They were living in boxes, and everyone looked so weak, and dirty. I remember feeling like I had been sucked into the television during one of those “Sponsor a Child for $1 a Day” commercials.

“Is that where they live?” I asked.

“Yes, Beta,” my dad said. “These people don’t have very much.”

“Where do they use the bathroom?” I asked. It was obvious that their “homes” didn’t have toilets.

“Wherever they can find a place,” the driver said.

I looked back out of the window, and saw sheets of aluminum stacked together like card houses. Women were hanging their rags over clothes lines, and naked children played in the streets. When we arrived at my aunt and uncle’s house, I was happy to see they were financially well-settled. We spent a few weeks traveling through Hyderabad visiting family we had never met, and then took a trip to visit my cousin who was living at an all-girls boarding school four hours north of where we were, in a place called Ooty. We planned on taking a train to get there, and when we got to the station, my nasal passages burned with the stench of urine. Once we got on the train I started to feel nauseous. If you’ve ever traveled overseas to a third-world country, then you know that there is a 99 percent chance that you will catch a stomach virus. I had to use the bathroom, so I tiptoed through the train car, trying my best not to touch anything. When I reached the bathroom, I looked around for a potty, and came face to face with a squat toilet. As if things couldn’t have gotten any worse, I had to, as my mom would say, do Number Two. I tried to take my pants off without getting them stuck on my shoes, but that was nearly impossible. I had to take my shoes off, and focused on not letting any part of my foot touch the ground. As I balanced on one foot with my naked bum exposed, little children started coming by the window, sticking their hands through the metal bars begging for money. Just as someone would shew them away, men selling lentil cakes would show up, and then, the train started to move. This was probably the worst day in the 11 years I had been alive. I was waving off strangers sticking their hands through a window where I was trying to balance on one foot over a hole in the ground on a moving train while I tried to take a crap.
Had I understood the concept of suicide at that age, I would likely have considered it.

The trip to visit my cousin in Ooty was a lot fun, minus the week-long vomiting and diarrhea combo I came down with. But even with a pale face, and shaky legs, I still manged to produce, direct and star in a play with my sister and cousin for my parents where I played Micheal Jackson, and did the moonwalk.
Children are resilient.

So far, our stay in India had been a lot of fun. There were a few things that took a little getting use to, like filling up a bucket to shower with, buffalo’s milk instead of cow’s, and the lizards that often found their way into homes. Uzma and I were starting to feel well-adjusted when my parents decided it was time to take us into the more impoverished areas of the city to show us first-hand how children our age, and younger, lived. We drove to a small village where some of my ancestors came from, about an hour from my aunt and uncle’s place. My parents cut oranges, and gave them to Uzma and me to distribute to the children.

I stepped outside of the tiny house were were in, and yelled, “Who wants oranges?”

“Sabrina, they don’t understand English,” my mom said.

As I tried to contemplate how someone couldn’t understand English, my mom translated what I said, and a dozen children came sprinting toward us. The juice from the oranges dripped down their dusty hands, exposing the dark brown pigment in their skin. I felt their coarse little fingers, and the roughness of their palms rub against my privileged hands as the food was exchanged. When the oranges were gone, my dad called us into the house, and gave us a mountain of coins.

“Go give this to them,” he instructed, and my sister and I went back outside.

Before we could say anything, a little boy in the distance spotted us and yelled “Pesa!” which translates to ‘money’ in Hindi. And like pigeons chasing breadcrumbs, those kids hailed full force toward us, knocking me backwards into the door frame. This time around they were tougher, desperate. The smiles were gone, the laughter had sobered, and I panicked, throwing all the money into the street, and then stumbled back into the house.

By the time we got back to my aunt and uncle’s place, the stress from the trip was starting to set in. It had been a long day, and an ever longer few weeks. Because we traveled  during the summer, it was monsoon season in India, and I had never seen so much rain in my life. When it started, it was as if the heavens opened, and buckets the size of oceans dumped their fills to the earth. Monsoon season means a lot of things in India in regard to the heat, agriculture, and flooding. But it also means that all the little critters that live outside need a shelter, just like people do. When we got home, we walked into a sea of bugs covering about eight square feet of tile in the foyer. I had never seen such a thing. They were some sort of insects with missing wings, spinning in circles on the floor like cracked-out break dancers. And that’s when I broke. I jumped on my dad’s back, and started to cry. I knew I was too old to cry, and I was well aware of how this must have looked to our hosts who had been so gracious, and selfless during our visit. They were my mom’s family, whom she loved dearly, and I was the spoiled American brat who had never seen a bug. I tried my best to hold my emotions in, but it was just too much. The rain, the smells, the bats, the fever, the long hours in the plane, on the train, in the 3-wheeled motor cars.

“I want to go home,” I said to my dad who held me on his back.

“It’s okay, Beta,” he said. “Look, they can’t even fly.”

My aunt called for a servant to come sweep all the bugs out immediately, and my dad soldiered through the insects with me clutching to his shoulders for dear life. I could feel the tension I caused in the room. I’m sure my parents wished I had held it together better, but I think they understood. The poverty, the children, the village. It all came crashing down on me at once, and my tough 11-year-old exterior that watched men pummel each other’s faces with fists and metal chairs, and did the “Tootsie Roll” with my friends at a school dance, had finally cracked. I wanted carpet instead of tile, and flowing water to fall from an overhead attachment in the shower — I also wanted real Frosted Flakes.

When we went to India, we were living in Germany where my Indian roots became part of what defined me. But when we traveled to that very place, I couldn’t identify with anything.

***

We returned to India many years later when I was 19. Although I was ecstatic to return after so long,  I mentally prepared myself for the lifestyle change I’d have to endure for the next few weeks. Now that I was in college, people still asked me where I was from – sometimes my parents’ heritage was the right answer, other times where I was born was the right answer. I had recently been re-exposed to Islam, and my identity as a Muslim was being redefined each day. I battled through a lot of internal turmoil during that time, trying to figure out what it meant to be a Muslim, and how I would — if I would be able to embrace this new identity into my life. There were moments of confusion and uncertainty, but I remember the moment of clarity I had on our second run to my mom’s hometown. We were sitting in a room with a few of my aunts, and a dozen of my cousins and their kids when I looked around the room, and suddenly understood where I came from. India was not my home, but I started to feel a special affinity toward these people who loved me in spite of the 8,000 miles that separated us. I suddenly understood the olive in my skin, the curve of my hips, the weight of my bones, and the color of my hair. I even understood where my sense of humor came from. It was all from this group. This group of incredible, selfless, strong and passionate women.

When we got back to my aunt’s house, my 11-year-old cousin gave me a card she made for me. It was a piece of periwinkle colored card stock folded in half with flowers, hearts and stars drawn on the front.  The outside read, “To: Sabrina Apa” (’Apa’ is a word that is used as a term of respect and endearment for a girl who is older than you.) When I opened the card, I was overwhelmed with what she had written. It said, “Welcome Home,” and with those two simple words, I had a place to belong.

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