Taste of Two Percent

I’ve a bit of headache this morning.  I earned it.  I’m up.  Two and then three cups of soda water.  Pour yesterday’s coffee so as to heat up in the microwave.  Change my mind.  Dump it.  There’s new coffee in there.  There’s a backup of new coffee in the freezer.  Dump it.  Dump this down.  I want half and half.  I search although I know that my younger one must have tossed it when she went through like a hawk yesterday inspecting expiration dates.  There’s nothing but two percent milk.  The thought of the taste of two percent milk in coffee aggravates my headache.  But I pour it in anyway and head back to the office room.

Fortunately, there is a door I can go through into the University of Southern California in the 1920s and consider someone else’s situation.  Wallace Thurman was born in Salt Lake City, attended USC and then traveled to Harlem.  And his character Emma Lou Morgan follows the same distinct path, anxious to engage with a real, vibrant African American community only to be rebuffed and dismissed because she has such a dark complexion.  “The Blacker the Berry:  A Novel of Negro Life,” was apparently shocking in its day, exposing the suffocating hypocrisy of pigmentary prejudice within the African American community itself. 

Emma Lou . . . come on.  Alva?  Her love must have been rather strong to justify the repeated returns to Alva, the handsome mulatto alcoholic who doesn’t mean her any good.  This proved increasingly difficult for me to abide.  Emma Lou had more dignity than that.  But the dull smothering that slowly asphyxiates any real choice for Emma Lou settles in despite the plot mechanisms and I empathized with this sensitive spirit.  What could she do?  Everything around her reminds her that she is imperfect, and she knows that she is guilty too in the way she views the pigment of those around her.  There doesn't seem to be any way out. 

This theme is different, of course, but still quite familiar to anyone that has spent time in China.  Women covet lighter skin.  For millenniums, darker skin suggested that you were a peasant, who worked in the field, and couldn’t protect yourself from the sun.  Chinese young ladies walk around in the sun with umbrellas to protect their pale complexions, rather than applying any Coppertone.  And I asked my older one and my wife about how this theme played out in their lives.  My older one mentioned that her classmates commented favorably how bulimic anemia made one look so wonderfully pale.  My wife mentioned a time some oaf in the Bay Area Chinese community had told her she was very pretty, but would be so much more beautiful, if only she had lighter skin.  I considered the blue veins beneath my milk bottle forearms and I reached out to hand them the copy of Thurman’s book, suggesting they might enjoy. 

Saturday, 07/18/20