Looking Back, Facing Forward

I remember the day I became white. It was my friend Liza's birthday and she was inviting members of our Kindergarten class to her upcoming party. Ohhhh, I was excited! I loved birthday parties and I especially loved Liza. She was a really dark skinny black girl with her hair plaited in cornrows. It was always fuzzy because she went a long time before she would have it redone. And her mama used those cheap little red, yellow and blue rubber bands on the ends of the plaits. I thought she was awesome but she didn't invite me to her party.

"Why didn't you invite me?," I asked Liza. "Because you white," she said. "What do you mean?," I asked. "You white and white people don't go to black people house." Oh. I didn't go to the party, nor did I forget the incident.

I was born and raised in Gadsden County and went to public school through seventh grade. I am not sure if my parents were lower middle class or upper lower class because we lived a good life with everything we needed and quite a bit of the stuff we wanted. My mom worked for Talquin and then Higdon Grocery Company while my dad worked for Higdon Furniture Company. They had black and white friends and we socialized with many of them. As in we went to their house. Kinda blew Liza's proclamation away. My folks didn't model the prejudices that are still so common in the South which is why Liza's declaration of my ethnicity threw me. I hadn't ever been a color before.

Looking at this photo of my great-great-aunt Ellafair Anderson Jackson I can't help but wonder what color Liza would have called her. Ellafair was Creek Indian. One hundred percent. But what was Creek? Ellafair had some very strong ethnic characteristics: thick lips, dark skin, course hair. I am still learning about Creek history and culture so I am not surprised to have just read that other Muskogean tribes were absorbed by the Creek, who held blackslaves and intermarried with them. This explains a lot, including my nose. I am extremely interested in finding out more about this branch of my family tree, especially Great-Great-Great-Grandfather Tom Anderson who was a Creek Chief. He is my Holy Grail.

As our country becomes increasingly more multi-cultural and multi-racial, I find myself teaching more tolerance than anything else in my classroom. Since beginning my ancestral research I have thrown “because you think I am white” into discussions about race with students. This throws them because most of them are learning their attitudes from their parents and are conditioned to identify others by their appearance while wearing their own color on their sleeve. They don’t know what to do with a woman who looks white but has a black nose and claims to be Native American. What would Liza do?