"An American Looks Like Me"
Jesse Beason
Last weekend, Sam read an Excerpt from "Posessing the Secret of Joy" by Alice Walker - a favorite - at the African-American Read-in. You can read more about the Read-in in The Oregonian.
Context: At this point in Walker’s novel, we find Tashi serving in the home of her tribe’s witch doctor, M’lissa. Tashi has recently returned to Africa from America and attempts to relate her impression of a typical American to the doubtful witch.
What does an American look like?, the old witch has asked me. I started right in describing Raye. She is of a color not seen in Africa, I say. Except in certain seed pods or lightish brown kinds of wood. She has curly hair that is at the same time a bit nappy. Also never seen in Africa. And she has freckles. Also not seen in Africa. M’lissa listens carefully and then questions shrewdly. Really? She asks. But is not America the land of the ghostly whites?
I hasten to describe Amy Maxwell. Her wired smile and powdery skin that is tinged with yellow and pink. Her bony shoulders and marble eyes. Her teased white hair. Her sorrow and hurt.
But M’lissa is not satisfied.
I begin to describe people with yellow skin and slanted eyes. These, she scoffs, must be Eskimos, of whom she has heard. Everyone knows they live far in the frozen north. Am I sure I can describe a real American?
I describe white men from television, with hearty voices and fake warmth in their eyes. I describe Indians from India and Native Americans from Minnesota. Red women with black hair. Yellow people with blue eyes. Brown people with black eyes who speak a language from another country.
M’lissa waits.
It seems there is no answer to her question. Americans, after all, have come from so many places. This thought alone, I think, must boggle the mind of M’lissa, who’s never been anywhere.
If you say to someone in Africa: What does an Olinkan or Massai look like, there is an easy answer. They are brown or very brown. They are notably short or tall. But no, shortness or tallness, browness or redness, is not what makes an American.
Finally, outdone, but also sensing an ancient trick, I stopped this little game of hers, and brought us closer to the day of her death.
What does an American look like? She teased me complacently after several weeks had passed and I’d offered her hundreds of descriptions of American who rarely resembled each other physically and yet resembled each other deeply in their hidden histories of fled-from pain.
What does an American look like? I asked the question softly to myself, and looked M’lissa in the eye. The answer surprised us both.
An American, I said, sighing, but understandng my love of my adopted country perhaps for the first time: an American looks like a wounded person whose wound is hidden from others, and sometimes from herself. An American looks like me.
Posted by Jesse Beason on February 21, 2006
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I've really enjoyed your posts, thanks. I wanted to suggest you add Street Roots to your list of media links since your posts deal with working poverty...
Posted by: brain | Feb 21, 2006 6:48:43 PM