At Home in the World

Summers, and random weekends during the rest of the year, meant road trips with my family a couple hours south of my neighborhood to Walt Disney World. Inside that artificially constructed universe of theme parks and time-share condominiums in the middle of New Florida, I remember marveling at the signs in English and some strange language written underneath, with letters like “ñ” and words like “y.” I remember hearing people speak in languages I’d never heard spoken before, and seeing types of people and families I’d never seen in my heretofore black-and-white world on the Northside of Jacksonville. As a map geek and a geography nerd, I remember preferring Epcot Center to the Magic Kingdom because it had all the different countries you could visit in a single day.

But what I remember most was how my parents interacted with other people. How they laughed and joked with other parents while we waited in line for rides or shows or overpriced hamburgers. I remember an Asian lady asking my father about the brand of camcorder he held atop his shoulder, back when he still wore coaching shorts and varsity-striped tube socks up to his knee: “Sharp,” he said. I remember her accent as she repeated the word, and how they briefly compared notes about camcorder brands fluidly and without any real barrier to communication. 

I saw my parents model an ease of interaction, a flow of discourse and exchange. I saw them delight in conversation and engagement, if only fleeting and with people they would never know beyond those short connections. And these were the same communication skills I’d seen them activate with their life-long friends in our community in “Blacksonville”: after church on Sundays, or at a backyard barbecue, or in a shopping center parking lot when their paths crossed with someone they knew. These were also the same communication skills I’d seen them activate with my grandparents, who were, in reality, a white couple who had been the parents of one of my father’s former students and who had babysat my brother and I until we all became family.

My mother and father grew up in segregation. Mickey and Miami have fooled people into thinking otherwise, but Florida is and always was a Southern state. My father was born during the Baby Boom and lived in a shotgun house on the brother side of Jacksonville, the youngest of four siblings. His older brother, Julian, made a name for himself as a local swimming champ up at the Jefferson Street Pool, putting paid to the notion, at least in our neck of the woods, that Black folks don’t know how to swim. Their father told them that they should grow up and become morticians and therefore make money in an industry with infinitely promising growth potential. None of them ever did.

My mother was born in 1938 and was a year old by the time Gone With the Wind debuted in Atlanta, Hitler invaded Poland, and Billie Holiday recorded “Strange Fruit.” A convoluted family tree with French, German, Cherokee, and West African roots culminated in a pale-skinned, freckled yella gal born in Jacksonville with “Negro” listed as the race on her birth certificate, in accordance with the then-codified one-drop rule. An only child with a ponytail pulled by love-haters, both black and white, who thought she thought she was all that because her hair would blow in the wind, my mother tested the boundaries of the system by drinking from whites-only water fountains and putting things on layaway at whites-only department stores.

Jacksonville had simmering racial tensions, but Black folks could do well-enough there. Three Black universities in the region spawned a professional class only a few decades out of slavery, and the “Negroes” of Duval County, Florida, didn’t really care that they were banned from Jacksonville’s beaches; they had their own Black-owned beach resort one county up at American Beach. The numbers were large enough to ensure relative safety and even some success. Believe it or not, Jacksonville was kinda live back in the day, so much so that Zora Neale Hurston sent Janie and Tea Cake to the city for work in Their Eyes Were Watching God and the original stage production of Carmen Jones was set at a local parachute factory during the War.

In fact, my father, a shade of brown I usually describe as coffee regular, while recognizing the nationwide struggles of Black folk throughout his youth, doesn’t recall a single incident of racial profiling, police harassment, or even sly shade thrown his way by whites during the time before integration — afterwards being a different story. But then, he never ventured far beyond the boundaries of Blacksonville, which extended over to Tallahassee and down to Daytona Beach, where you’d go for college.

It was my mother, with the ponytail that turned reddish-gold in summer, who had left Florida for college and had been called into the university president’s office to meet the mayor of Columbia, South Carolina, who had been convinced the school had integrated without his knowledge when he saw her leading the marching band during a parade. She’d been the one who had to move to the colored car on the train headed home after visiting relatives in New York, once the train crossed the Potomac into Virginia. She’d been the one whose first husband, a dark-skinned preacher’s boy who taught math or chemistry or both at Jackson State, had been stopped and questioned by the cops for driving a white woman around in his car, until the white woman produced her ID card bearing “Negro.” Of course, then, the incredulous patrolman followed them home and waited outside their house for several hours just to be sure. She’d been the one who dined at Myrlie and Medgar’s house before Medgar ended up a martyr.

I asked her once how she didn’t become bitter in the throes of the Civil Rights Movement. She said it had a lot to do with her upbringing. She was taught that if someone was nice to you, regardless of their color, then there was no reason not to be friendly back to them. And if they had a problem, it was just that: their problem.

And when integration finally came to Jacksonville, barely a decade before I was born and after much stalling and interference by state and local officials under the banner of “states’ rights,” both of my parents worked as teachers in a public school system strained from forced busing and forced integration.

They married shortly thereafter, my father’s father launching into an endearing and thoughtful treatise on the challenges that an interracial couple would face in the early 1970s, until Pops told him Moms was “incognegro.” They were the third black family to move into our neighborhood.

Soon, I came along, a Born Free, to borrow a South African phrase, unburdened with the ostensible legal shackles of segregation and with two parents who I never, ever once heard judging a group of people by the actions of an individual. It was these same parents who exposed me, as a young child, to James Brown and Johannes Sebastian Bach, to reading and languages and unconventional experiences and people of different shades, hues, tones, and colors.

By the time I was ten years old, all the white families in the neighborhood had moved away except one, and when the Johnsons finally left five or six years later, they sat with my parents and told them they were moving out west to be with their children, not because the demographics of the neighborhood had changed. I’ll always remember Mr. Johnson because he cut his hedges into geometric and animal shapes. Every Christmas, Mrs. Johnson would make her own M&Ms and give them to the neighborhood kids as presents.

As I grew older, I became aware of two things. One is that I lived in a society that called me “nigger,” that followed me around in stores, that stopped me for invented infractions. It was a society that allowed my school to have raggedy facilities and second-hand textbooks, that defunded education, privatized health care, criminalized poverty. It was a society that continued the extermination of young black women and men, now by bullet if not by rope.

The other is that my parents, who grew up in American Apartheid, who have been stereotyped and judged by their skin colors, Zip codes, and cultural attributes, have always led their lives with love: a love of people, a love of service, a love of possibility, a love of life. A love that overpowers the pain of prejudice.

My mother cried as she drove me to the airport before dawn one morning to catch a flight to New York, then onward to Sweden. I was 16 years old and was off to live with a host family for six weeks the summer before my senior year of high school. She cried because her baby was going off all by himself for the first time. I think she also cried because she knew her baby wouldn’t return a baby.

I remember, on the flight up to New York, sitting next to a white businesswoman and talking, probably way too much, about my upcoming trip. I don’t remember her exact response, but I remember her being nice. I’d like to say I perceived an energy of encouragement, a desire to see me do well. I carried that energy with me through my layover at JFK, where I met the other half-plane-load of high schoolers from around the country who’d be spending their summer in Sweden. I remember connecting with the only other Black American kid in the group, a tall, athletic boy from somewhere forgettable, but with a chipped front tooth. I remember laughing with a Vietnamese-American girl from Texas, with a twang and a ton of personality. I remember long talks with a brilliant Iranian-American girl from upstate New York. We befriended other kids in the group, too, but for some reason, these are the ones who come to mind. The ones who, like me, likely had more hope—and tears—packed into our luggage than we knew.

That first experience away from home, away from my community and away from the United States, opened me to a lived experience outside of the books and movies and trips to Disney World that had constituted travel up to that point. It opened me up to a life out in the world, a life in the world, where I belonged no matter my exterior packaging. 

Since that trip, I’ve visited 70 countries and lived in five. I’ve experienced prejudice over the years, in surprising, disappointing ways. I’ve also experienced love, in surprising, profound ways: the love of people, service, possibility, and life that I’d seen my parents embody my entire life. And I have the privilege of connecting with people around the world from whom I am but one WhatsApp message away. Community.

Without that foundation of confidence, of humor, of kindness, of humility, of love instilled by my Black, Southern parents, I may never have discovered who I am in the world. I may never have discovered my worth as a human whose community exists beyond the limits of skin color or ethnicity or nationality or physical boundary. I may never have discovered that loving each other in all our messy, unwieldy ways of being is, really, all we’re here to do.

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