De Amerikaanse schrijfster, uitgeefster en politiek activiste Rebecca Walker werd geboren op 17 november 1969 in Jackson, Mississippi. Zie ook alle tags voor Rebecca Walker op dit blog.

Uit: Black, White, and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self

“I was born in November 1969, in Jackson, Mississippi, seventeen months after Dr. King was shot. When my mother went into labor my father was in New Orleans arguing a case on behalf of black people who didn’t have streetlights or sewage systems in their neighborhoods. Daddy told the judge that his wife was in labor, turned his case over to co-counsel, and caught the last plane back to Jackson.

When I picture him, I conjure a civil rights Superman flying through a snowstorm in gray polyester pants and a white shirt, a dirty beige suede Wallabee touching down on the curb outside our house in the first black middle-class subdivision in Jackson. He bounds to the door, gallantly gathers up my very pregnant mother who has been waiting, resplendent in her African muumuu, and whisks her to the newly desegregated hospital. For this final leg, he drives a huge, hopelessly American Oldsmobile Toronado.

Mama remembers long lines of waiting black women at this hospital, screaming in the hallways, each encased in her own private hell. Daddy remembers that I was born with my eyes open, that I smiled when I saw him, a look of recognition piercing the air between us like lightning.

And then, on my twenty-fifth birthday, Daddy remembers something I’ve not heard before: A nurse walks into Mama’s room, my birth certificate in hand. At first glance, all of the information seems straightforward enough: mother, father, address, and so on. But next to boxes labeled “Mother’s Race” and “Father’s Race,” which read Negro and Caucasian, there is a curious note tucked into the margin. “Correct?” it says. “Correct?” a faceless questioner wants to know. Is this union, this marriage, and especially this offspring, correct?

A mulatta baby swaddled and held in loving arms, two brown, two white, in the middle of the segregated South. I’m sure the nurses didn’t have many reference points. Let’s see. Black. White. Nigger. Jew. That makes me the tragic mulatta caught between both worlds like the proverbial deer in the headlights. I am Mammy’s near-white little girl who plunges to her death, screaming, “I don’t want to be colored, I don’t want to be like you!” in the film classic Imitation of Life. I’m the one in the Langston Hughes poem with the white daddy and the black mama who doesn’t know where she’ll rest her head when she’s dead: the colored buryin’ ground behind the chapel or the white man’s cemetery behind gates on the hill.”

 

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