“Let me guess. Black daddy, white momma.”
It wasn’t a question. There was no inflection. It was a declaration, a label. I couldn’t help but think of branding, a symbol seared into skin. The words we think we can apply to name and contain, to understand, to own. She was smiling, comfortable, as if pleased with herself for her confidence while engaging me, a perfect stranger.
I thought my closed eyes would’ve given her the signal, given the other three women gathered around her, the signal that I didn’t want to engage. I wasn’t interested in small talk.
Let me guess.
I chose to open my eyes then. It’s instinctual, body memory, to sense when it’s approaching. The question, poking at my identity, and beneath that subtle request, the unexamined privilege. The demand. Caught on some energetic clothesline at the neck, confined by how another sees me. Called out. Set apart.
It was a late autumn night. Moonless. The stars were brilliant in their thirteen-billion-year-old display. Nothing unusual for New Mexico. A girlfriend and I had broken free of our corresponding four walls and work desks. Our bodies had been contorted and neglected from serving our mental demands for too long. Under the yoke of responsibilities and tasks lists, our shoulders had collapsed forward, tilting towards our ears.
We’d driven north together at dusk to soak in the hot springs at Ojo Caliente. Each pool contained the concentration of a specific mineral—arsenic, iron, lithium, soda water—known for centuries to be healing to the body’s tissues. For nearly three hours, I’d been migrating from tub to tub in the dark. Dim spa lights placed along the walking paths guided safe footing. New age music piped through open air reminded me of the decade I spent earning my living as a licensed massage therapist—another neck, another set of hands, another set of feet, the controlled environment, the soundtrack for relaxation habituated within me. These adornments came with the gentrification of Ojo Caliente, when new out-of-state owners acquired it some years back. While most of those I knew grumbled at all the high-end changes (and prices), we still visited the pools. Mainly in the quiet season, on off days and hours—early afternoon weekdays or at night. I preferred the latter when guests seemed to be quieter, fewer, and it was harder to get a good look at another person, nearly impossible to make eye contact. Privacy in public, something I appreciated. Similar to silence in a crowd. The presence of others while maintaining continuous unbroken contact with myself was a sweet, rare occurrence.
Let me guess.
Waiting for my friend, I’d showered, dressed, and was standing between the women’s locker room and the entrance/exit, within the warm reach of the fireplace from which a stone bench ran along either side. This is where the speaker sat. Tending to the fire as if it were hers alone. A couple of women had parked within inches of her legs. I stood on the edge of the shadow. Wet hair tucked into my hoodie, head bent, hands dug into pockets, feeling myself continue to navigate my inner terrain—feeling the density of my body while simultaneously aware of the sensation I had of floating. Moments before, I had been immersed in 106-degree water up to my chin, skin softening, muscles softening, tendons softening, circulation pulsing with ease. Internal quiet. Calm. Layers of melting. My body nestled against rock, the body of the earth. The heavens nearly revealed through all those diamonds dancing across time and space. I’d been altered to say the least. And there in front of the fire, I continued to feel less burdened by the need to perform, less gripped by the perfection and failure I’d showed up with hours before—which manifested in frequent battles with migraines and lower back pain.
I wasn’t aware of the details of their talking, just the voices of women. One voice was particularly commanding and bothersome despite the signs posted all around the spa asking for quiet.
Let me guess.
It was a hook of sorts. There was a pause. My eyes were slow to open, but they did. Heavy-lidded and iguana like. The fire fisted red and orange, opened its palm of yellow light, threw sparks then closed its heated red fist, again and then again.
Descending from the outdoor speakers, the sound of a flute as if played by the popular Taos Pueblo Native, Robert Mirabal.
“Let me guess. Black daddy, white momma.”
She was a white woman, somewhere between forty-five and fifty, a good dozen years older than me at the time. Blond hair nearly touching her shoulders. A sturdy, durable build. Her voice carried.
My breathing remained slow. I felt my voice start, not in my mouth, but deep in my belly. My answer surprised me. It was the first time in my life I’d responded in such a way.
“Not,” I paused and took my time expanding with another full breath. “Okay.”
She froze. The light of the flames illuminated her face. The smile fixed there, straining. One of the women stood from her chair and disappeared. The remaining witness surveyed the pair of us—the one questioning, the one expected to answer.
~
Writing this six years later, reflecting on that complex moment, I hold close to what never makes sense but always satisfies beyond the language it uses—poetry—in particular, Lucille Clifton.
mother-tongue: we are dying
no failure in us
that we can be hurt like this,
that we can be torn.
death is a small stone
from the mountain we were born to.
we put it in a pocket
and carry it with us
to help us find our way home.
In the early 1990’s, when I was a sophomore at Jonathan Alder High School in Plain City, Ohio, a copy of Clifton’s collection of poems, quilting, arrived at my doorstep. It was signed. She was the first black woman poet I’d ever read. The young man who sent it to me had graduated the year before from the same school, leaving the town and the state for West Point. While he was not Puerto Rican or LatinX (there were no other LatinX students at the school that I can recall), he was mixed race. In his graduating class, if my memory serves correct, there were three other students of color. After they left, it meant there were only two of us, (Or was it three? Definitely no more than four.), remaining in the entire student body of ninth through twelfth grades, a population of something like five hundred at the time. I don’t ever remember talking about race or identity with him. There was a false sense of sameness in the way we were conditioned. We were expected to bend ourselves towards the homogeny, surrender to the white body culture of the school and the town. To call it out at that age would’ve meant conscious annihilation versus the unconscious annihilation we endured. We were told on rare occasions when race could not be avoided, that our friends didn’t see our color, our difference. We were all the same. Just like them. My friend knew I was a poet and he believed in me. While in the hallways and at school and church functions, he watched out for me, walked alongside me as if a brother, made sure I was always safe. That he sent me this book was a way in which he continued to stay connected, perhaps saying all the things we were unable to draw up from our depths and unable to name—our details, our specificity. It was another kind of protection he was offering—kinship with other women poets of color. Many more followed after his introduction. The seed of inclusion had been planted despite those school years where our classmates couldn’t see us and we couldn’t see ourselves.
No failure in us/that we can be hurt like this/…and carry it with us/ to help us find our way home.
~
While “black daddy, white momma” was not my reality, if anything, it was something closer to my mother’s experience. Born and raised in her younger years in Puerto Rico by a light-skinned mother from Carolina and a dark-skinned father from Loíza, “The Heart of Puerto Rico’s Black Culture” (see article by same name in Repeating Cultures: News and commentary on Caribbean culture, literature and the arts). My mother spent most of her childhood with extended family in Rio Piedras before relocating to New York. Loíza is known for many things, among them, vejigante masks, and the dance of Bomba, as well as the largest concentration of black inhabitants on the island. It is a creative cornerstone of the territory, art resistance by survivors of the enslaved. Dances embedded with liberation, spirit and sovereignty reinforced by the barril. The turn of heel, of hips in the batey, picquettes made by the dancer signaling to the primo drummer how to strike the barril—co-creative improvisation. For me, to dance it is quickly altering and exhilarating.
Named for its female Taíno cacique (chief) Yuiza, baptized Luisa, among the first to encounter those from the old world. I can see the colonizers in my imagination, a moment of contact. The condition of their complexions after having traveled so far by sea, the rot of their breath, the ship rats rushing the shore. I can see her shoulders, like my mothers, shaped from rowing strength. Did she smile? Did she show her teeth? How exotic she must have been to those disembarking. Unless those on the ship were mixed themselves, “Spanish,” or was it a combination of Spanish and those from northern Africa and the Middle East?
Let me guess.
The Spanish were legendary for being the most severe in their absorption, in the claiming of other peoples and cultures as their own, thereby populating the force, the expanse and power of the Spanish Crown.
In 2019, while seated at the same table as Joy Harjo at dinner hosted by the Lannan Foundation, a dinner following a conversation and reading between her and Tracy K. Smith—an awe-inspiring, poetry-as-life affirming event to say the least. That evening, I made small talk with an author sitting across from me. He had spent years in Puerto Rico, in Loíza, and documented it, with a very particular kind of attention, appreciation and awe. I wanted to know everything he knew. There is no English translation for the book published in 2000: Las fiestas de Santiago Apóstol en Loíza: La cultura afro-puertorriqueña ante los procesos de hibridacíon y globalizacíon (Colección Visioines y cegueras). It continues to sit on the altar in my writing room. Both near and far, known and unknown, not unlike I’ve experienced my ancestors, not unlike I’ve experienced myself.
~
For my mother who was apart from any Puerto Rican community once she relocated to the mainland, there seemed to be a clear directive, to pass. In the racially charged 1960’s (Is there ever a time when we cannot say, “racially charged,” in U.S. history?), I imagine it did not take much for her to understand the violent border between black and white in this country. As a Boricua (in that name for me is the inherent understanding of being mixed, perhaps that’s because of the reality of my own family’s composition), stripped of language and culture, she seemed to feel most comfortable, the safest, hiding behind “exotic.”
Through the small towns across central Ohio where we migrated, many she encountered were not familiar with Puerto Rico. It bought her the status of “other.” A thin margin from which she was permitted access on occasion, despite being working poor, to rent space for a single chair barber shop, to obtain a car loan, and to secure housing in the rural Midwest dominated by white body supremacy.
Exotic.
Add beautiful.
Add nice.
And you have an aesthetically pleasing, nonthreatening woman of questionable origin. Given that she went to an all-white church, cut the hair of husbands and sons, meant there was a certain amount of leash, of permission she was given with minimal questioning. But not so much permission that she might use it to trust herself, use that trust to imagine something, anything, better. More whole and humane. This was my study growing up, or rather, I was her understudy. Comprehending that I made others uneasy because of how I looked, and that they were confused because of me, made it somehow my responsibility to calm them, to explain my genetic list of ingredients. And I often heard the same thing, in the pause before answering as if to explain, and or, hide the inherent racist undertone:
“You’re so exotic.”
“You’re so beautiful.”
“What are you?”
The trained smile. The trained responsibility of taking care, of providing an answer. Perhaps the moment at the hot spring was my effort to train someone else instead, on what was acceptable.
~
My grandfather and I share the same birthday, May 10th. I did not know this until I was in my mid-30’s visiting his brother-in-law, my great uncle, the oldest living relative at the time, in Rio Piedras. He gave me a memorial card from my grandfather’s, Aniceto, funeral twenty-some years earlier. I like to imagine the way these days echo each other some sixty years apart. His mother and his daughter both laboring on the same calendar day of the year. An ordinary yet miraculous event, another generation birthed and added to the ongoing strand of ancestry.
I knew we had family in Rio Piedras ever since I was a little girl. My mother’s last home on the island was there. Because it took decades for me to arrive, I had time to imagine it. The imagining was in the name. And it was so strong that even the reality of the place once there as an adult could not remove the imagining I’d come to claim.
Rio Piedras. River Stones.
I could see and hear the water, hold the weight of round, smooth rock in my hand. My imagining didn’t take me past the name as I found myself quickly immersed in the current. Perhaps it was the river beneath the river that held my attention. “A river is a liminal place, the sacred site of in-between where magick is made. It is a place of both earth and water. Here is a divine crossroads of spiritual energy. It is fertile with potential and possibility,” writes Lilith Dorsey in Orishas, Goddesses, and Voodoo Queens. “Oshun’s river water is a divine vehicle for healing.” It was healing that led me to the hot springs, to Ojo, or rather the name beneath that name, P’oseuinge, given by the Pueblo people who first came to know and have kinship with the waters. Healing that the Navajo, Apache, and Ute peoples were soaking in before the Spanish arrived, before the settlers expanded westward.
Rio Piedras. death is a small stone/ from the mountain we were born to/…and carry it with us/to help us find our way home.
It is Aniceto’s mother, my great-grandmother, who my own mother remembers sitting in a wheelchair having suffered physical limitations from a stroke. Nonetheless, the tales I heard were of how loving she was despite her own suffering and restriction, the wealth of love she gave to her grandchildren. I’ve often wondered why my mother didn’t want to be more like her, given that she is always the one who remains faultless in my mother’s island memories, a familial icon of love. Why my mother didn’t remember her grandmother’s strength and want to associate herself with her, claim her own identity as that as a woman of color, the descendant of her dark-skinned abuela, continues to cause me sadness. Could my mother not see herself? Trust her own eyes? Was the survival and the shame so all-encompassing and relentless that she tried to silence and subjugate the essential aspects of her identity even from her youngest daughter, who looked just like her? Did the subtleties of island racism floating just beneath the surface threaten to drown her once she was on the mainland? Or was the racism in America more wedge-like—the overculture’s incessant brainwashing of the “all American” man, woman, boy, girl? Was it too sharp, too wide of a wedge that split her, cleaved her from her own wholeness, her own sovereign knowing, leaving her disembodied and dependent on others to define her?
None of these questions can be answered. Not even by her. Especially not by her.
My mother didn’t see the value of claiming all her ancestors, didn’t see how this directly affected her own wholeness, her own healing, any possibility of post-traumatic thriving. Instead, she hid. When pressed, she responded with the generic identification of “Hispanic.” A word I cannot even tolerate in my mouth because it feels so loaded with colonial lies and laziness. In my formative years, never did she claim her Afro-Taíno family. In response, if mother-daughter relationships can be a form of call and response, I’ve lived my life contrary to hers. I can’t claim what is not my experience. Sidelining the white component in my mixed racial heritage, I’ve focused instead on what has systematically been devalued and ignored, vilified. I like to think I would have done this regardless of my appearance. I will say this: being set apart, questioned, made to answer the reason why I look the way I do to someone who is curious, who is white, thousands of times in my life, has compelled me to include my darker family—grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, second cousins—and thereby include myself.
~
Did she say, “Excuse me,” next? I can’t be sure.
It was my turn to speak.
My voice was slow and poured out of me with clear and deliberate annunciation. “Not. Okay. How you are engaging me, right now. It’s not okay.” This was the first of thousands of exchanges I’d endured in my lifetime where such a question was lodged at me in this way—Black daddy, white momma? And never have I ever been so relaxed. My sympathetic nervous system was in a deep snooze state. I could still see an impression in my mind’s eye of the infinite unfolding of stars I’d been staring at for hours. Those that had streaked across the sky, falling.
“I just meant—.” She needed me to know, and all those listening who by now had slowed their walk past us to a near crawl, that she didn’t do anything wrong. Necks craned, as if passing an accident site. The fire seemed to quiet as if it, too, were listening. She needed me to know that she was not being offensive, that if I continued in the way I was behaving, she was the one who would be offended.
“I know what you meant. It’s not okay. I do not want to be engaged like that.” It was so very personal, intimate, her tone. It took everything for granted.
Her hands flew up as if to stave off an aggressive dog. Quite easily she seemed to pivot to victim.
My voice continued in its methodical explanation as if she were one of the teenagers at the arts high school where I taught and I was explaining the need to develop characters beyond a one-dimensional, simplistic presentation. The labor required when rendering another human being. That everything—setting, plot, scene/dialogue, theme—hinged on the ability to cultivate complexity.
Unusual in this moment, I could feel my feet. I could feel the ground. It held me with a strength I’d not fully received before in an exchange such as this. Perhaps it was the near inner silence leading up to this moment. The lack of clutter in my mind, in my mouth. I was embodied yet objective. It was the wisdom of my body that spoke.
Since that time, “not okay,” has become my go to when caught in a harmful moment I’m not willing to tolerate because of a microaggression, or a “minor feeling” as Cathy Park Hong refers to it in her book, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning. When often struck mute by such moments of racism in real time by the emotional impact, the psychic impact, the spiritual impact, a go-to phrase is nothing short of a lifeline. For as benign as it appears now on the page, I’ve found that using the phrase “not okay” is akin to sounding an alarm. Everyone seems to stop. Fault and responsibility hang dense in the air waiting to be claimed. It’s clear and direct. That it’s less nonconfrontational than other possible responses does not minimize its impact. In response, I’ve experienced everything from near rage to immediate remorse and culpability. An apology, while not expected, has been known to occur. It did not in this exchange at Ojo.
~
I once heard a vejigante mask maker from Loíza explain how the faces emerged from the skin of the coconut. He was soft-spoken. Struck shy as he waited for the interpreter to finish translating in front of a dozen students from the mainland studying for a month at La UP. While I imagine Spanish has traumatized my tongue as much as my African and Taíno ancestors, as much as English traumatized my mother’s, I understood enough to know that the translator’s word choices fell flat. The excitement and spirited process, complex in meaning, came out over-simplified. Truncated into nick-nack status, souvenir quality. Who knows why she held back from honoring the potential for something sacred, essential in the engagement of masks, faces made of coconut or paper mâché, the array of horns, meant to signify the devil, or of the dark ones defeated in Spain championing St. James. Even the explanation easily accessible online reads thin. A yearly celebration. While masks are worn, any bad behavior is excused. What has been repressed is expressed. I peel back explanations for tourists, explanations languaged by the influence of the church and move beyond the surface trying to find what makes sense to me, a more soul satisfying implication.
The mask covers the entire head and from it, horns branch out. The full costume depicts a cloth made to resemble bat wings. Referencing Barbara G. Walker’s The Woman’s Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects, “Masks were common attributes of deities from the most primitive times, when people wearing masks literally impersonated their divinities. Egyptian art shows clearly that the gods appeared as human beings with elaborate masks that covered the entire head” (145). Walker also explains that a number of horned deities have been revered throughout time, having been associated with the moon and fertility. But that “when Christianity declared all of them devils, collectively, the composite devil figure inherited horns from all” (139). Add to this the bat allusion (devoid of religious overtones and horror movie motifs), the exquisite behavior and sonar intelligence of bats, our necessary pollinators, and even more possibilities of substantive meanings rise to the surface.
Despite my limited understanding and foolish act of gifting the one and only vejigante mask I owned to a transitory lover as if that would bind him to me a little longer, I see the mask and the celebration as sacred. One of the liberating acts that messaged to those enslaved, disenfranchised and disempowered by external authority, of their inherent right to the magic of life, the divine mystery and the equality that is present when engaging the unseen realms. This is where life is life and blood is blood. What’s been laid over the vejigante mask itself and its celebration is yet another explanation easy to digest for those who want to make an empowering life affirming experience something quaint and sellable. Profitable. Mind you, as the granddaughter of someone from this municipality, someone who I only know from pictures, I am no authority. I am scarcely aware. All my ways of turning this into some personal understanding are faulty, as anyone speaking in another language from another land from another generation will and should be.
Still, I’ve been obsessed with masks—the potential divine implication—and how we present, how we are told to present and how others find us, or not, presentable. Digging behind and underneath what is presented. There are truths in the language beneath the language, buried beneath layers of masks. In the river beneath the river is the hot, healing waters that emerge from deep in the body of the earth, the world under this world.
My artmaking/writing is driven by this need to confront the perspectives and assumptions that lead to stories that keep us from the truth of our core inherent expression. Exposing the stories that rob me of my multiplicity and multi-dimensionality, and beneath those habituated lies are the ways in which we are exactly the same—a heart that beats, lungs that breathe.
~
It’s a kind of exhaustion, being approached, interrupted, accosted. It’s the demand. It’s the taking. It’s that seemingly out of nowhere, in one random moment, power is being exerted. Over me. It’s the accumulation. The question beneath the question. The words beneath the words. No longer hidden. As if they are saying, I expect you to define yourself for me so I can feel comfortable. As if an unknown identity needs to be labeled for others’ curiosity, pleasure, entertainment, security and safety. As if they are the subject and I am the object.
~
My response emerged without any pre-thinking, thinking, overthinking. Thankfully. My own voice was a current that led me to respond in a way I hadn’t imagined.
Not okay.
What she wanted me to know, what gave her the permission to try and engage a perfect stranger the way she did was this—she had daughters who were mixed, as their father, her husband, was black.
“And they are as beautiful as you are,” she said as if finishing her defense.
That last line had a particular barb of the tongue to it as if somehow I’d been the one caught and stung by my own ignorance, instead of her.
What I wanted her to know—as I tried to speak above her, tried to interject as someone wearing the Ojo Caliente employee attire made their way towards us a bit too briskly for spa protocol—was that despite her own experience, her demand to engage me was unwelcome, that just because she had brown daughters didn’t make me her daughter, and that I resented her for her friendliness, her casual reduction.
As my friend came into view, standing beside me, car keys in hand, I said, “I’m sure your daughters are very beautiful. And I still get to say how I want to be treated. What is and what is not okay.”
We left the soaking area, made our way through the first set of double glass doors, past the check-in counter and the gift shop stocked with suggestions on how to accessorize one’s spirituality—polished stones engraved with affirmations, crystal jewelry promoting chakra balancing, organic clothing—and emerged from the second set of doors, new age music playing all the while.
~
Our headlights illuminated rock faces as we made our way south on highway 285. I could sense, as always, the vast views that were present during the day despite what my eyes could not register in the dark.
No matter how I tried in that moment, I was unable to express to my dear friend what had just happened while I waited for her. I struggle to fully grasp it even now and force it into language as I’ve been attempting to do in these pages. Still, I try. Because I know that healing happens in story. I know the power of my own voice telling my story heals me as the deep “magick” waters, “fertile with potential and possibility,” healed me that night.
Regardless of how my mother rejected her own color, and the darker ones of our family, she was the only thing I could reference growing up in an expanse of whiteness that made sure to single me out, set me apart. During my formative years, she was the only one with whom I could have any sense of who I was, who I came from. There was no other reference point reflecting me back to myself. If I couldn’t see myself, did I even exist? Wounded and troubled as she was, my mother is my origin story through whom, for a long time, I saw as my only access to the island of my family. Was the surprise twist in the woman’s explanation another part of the disturbance? That she was a mother, and therefore could behave this way? That she saw me as she sees her daughters? That as brown women, black women, we are interchangeable?
~
What lingers. Blind mothers. Well-intentioned mothers missing the complexity and the birth right to wholeness their daughters are longing to possess. The shame they shouldn’t feel. The shame they should. The need to always have them in the story—how essential they are in the ongoing strand of ancestry—no matter how they are or what they do.
~
What may forever linger. The sensation of being on display. An object for another to view and ascribe a label.
But I am not alone. Many essays have been written about it, collections, anthologies, libraries packed with these kinds of stories and archived. For all those who’ve survived and continue to survive this dehumanizing line of questioning, this assault by the privileged, we could create our own movement. We are.
It is simple. It is basic. Who, not where, I come from. Who, not what, I am. Being to being. Relational.
What is not simple? The constellations I could see that night. How our eyes receive light traveling from distances further than what our human mind can comprehend. Dark fields that when gazed upon, uninterrupted, animate themselves revealing additional galaxies, universes, lifetimes away. The infinite night sky, not unlike the depths of water from the underworld from which flows a healing source from the heart of the earth, and that as human beings we are all unnamed galaxies, all of us mysteries worthy of dignity and awe.
Contributor Notes
Jamie Figueroa is the author of the critically acclaimed novel BROTHER, SISTER, MOTHER, EXPLORER, which “brims with spellbinding prose, magical elements, and wounded, full-hearted characters that nearly jump off the page” (Publishers Weekly). Figueroa is Boricua (Afro-Taíno) by way of Ohio and is a longtime resident of northern New Mexico. Her writing has appeared in American Short Fiction, Emergence Magazine, Elle, McSweeney’s, and Agni, among others. She received a Truman Capote Award and was a Bread Loaf Rona Jaffe Scholar. A VONA alum, she received her MFA in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts.
