{"id":39861,"date":"2015-02-07T02:18:47","date_gmt":"2015-02-07T02:18:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=39861"},"modified":"2015-02-07T19:05:14","modified_gmt":"2015-02-07T19:05:14","slug":"sweetness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=39861","title":{"rendered":"Sweetness"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sweetness<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The New Yorker<\/a>
\n2015-02-09 Issue<\/a><\/p>\n

Toni Morrison<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

It\u2019s not my fault. So you can\u2019t blame me. I didn\u2019t do it and have no idea how it happened. It didn\u2019t take more than an hour after they pulled her out from between my legs for me to realize something was wrong. Really wrong. She was so black she scared me. Midnight black, Sudanese black. I\u2019m light-skinned, with good hair, what we call high yellow, and so is Lula Ann\u2019s father. Ain\u2019t nobody in my family anywhere near that color. Tar is the closest I can think of, yet her hair don\u2019t go with the skin. It\u2019s different\u2014straight but curly, like the hair on those naked tribes in Australia. You might think she\u2019s a throwback, but a throwback to what? You should\u2019ve seen my grandmother; she passed<\/a> for white, married a white man, and never said another word to any one of her children. Any letter she got from my mother or my aunts she sent right back, unopened. Finally they got the message of no message and let her be. Almost all mulatto<\/a> types and quadroons<\/a> did that back in the day\u2014if they had the right kind of hair, that is. Can you imagine how many white folks have Negro blood hiding in their veins? Guess. Twenty per cent, I heard. My own mother, Lula Mae, could have passed easy, but she chose not to. She told me the price she paid for that decision. When she and my father went to the courthouse to get married, there were two Bibles, and they had to put their hands on the one reserved for Negroes. The other one was for white people\u2019s hands. The Bible! Can you beat it? My mother was a housekeeper for a rich white couple. They ate every meal she cooked and insisted she scrub their backs while they sat in the tub, and God knows what other intimate things they made her do, but no touching of the same Bible.<\/p>\n

Some of you probably think it\u2019s a bad thing to group ourselves according to skin color\u2014the lighter the better\u2014in social clubs, neighborhoods, churches, sororities, even colored schools. But how else can we hold on to a little dignity? How else can we avoid being spit on in a drugstore, elbowed at the bus stop, having to walk in the gutter to let whites have the whole sidewalk, being charged a nickel at the grocer\u2019s for a paper bag that\u2019s free to white shoppers? Let alone all the name-calling. I heard about all of that and much, much more. But because of my mother\u2019s skin color she wasn\u2019t stopped from trying on hats or using the ladies\u2019 room in the department stores. And my father could try on shoes in the front part of the shoe store, not in a back room. Neither one of them would let themselves drink from a \u201cColored Only\u201d fountain, even if they were dying of thirst…<\/p>\n

Read the entire short story here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sweetness The New Yorker 2015-02-09 Issue Toni Morrison It\u2019s not my fault. So you can\u2019t blame me. I didn\u2019t do it and have no idea how it happened. It didn\u2019t take more than an hour after they pulled her out from between my legs for me to realize something was wrong. Really wrong. She was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,8],"tags":[3886,1240],"class_list":["post-39861","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-media-archive","tag-the-new-yorker","tag-toni-morrison"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39861","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=39861"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39861\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=39861"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=39861"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=39861"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}