Everything fades to gray

The blanket that lay across Emma's bed was capturing the night sky's creamy hue. By the moonlight slipping through her window, I could see my sister's face, framed by the mad curls sprawling out across her pillow. For a moment I was six again, curling up in my big sister's bed. The feeling passed.

At a vivacious 16, like most girls I felt pretty self-aware, to put it delicately. You know, I was bored; I felt my spreading wings trapped by my house's stone walls. Not to mention my all-too-predictable parents: one more "When I was young..." lecture from my mother, and I was ready to storm out. Thank you, but I could take care of myself.

Yet that night, I found myself blindsided.

"So you've heard about Robert?" Emma asked, her curt voice shattering the night's silhouettes.

"I think Grandma mentioned him once..." I started, "but I didn't ask."

"So she didn't tell you he died of a heart problem?"

"No..."

"That's what she told me."

What a sad story, I thought.

"But actually, he was shot in a bar," she continued. I rolled onto my side to face her. "You know, he was in the Black Panthers." Her voice cut the moonlight. "Broke contact with the family when he was pretty young, and all they'd hear was that after a while he was always in and out of jail..."

I thanked the darkness for veiling my widening eyes. It's one thing to find out that your mother, whom you always assumed an only child, had a brother. Discovering that he was shot in a bar only 10 years ago, another. But hearing that he was in the Black Panthers? In my case at least, that changed my life.

Our mother had never breathed a word to me about our family and race. If you'd asked me earlier that day where my family was from, I'd have told you, "Well, I'm actually a British citizen!" (I like to throw that fact around — there are a slew of flattering connotations attached to the accent, which, proudly, my father still has). I then probably would have led us off onto a tangent of any other sort I could find. If you had in fact managed to ask about my mother's lineage, I would have replied something along the lines of "Well, she's from Ohio..." (then I'd laugh, laugh at the contrast), "and, to be honest, she's all kinds of things — I'm, like, a sixteenth Native American. Got a little French in there too, I think — I don't really know!"

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Yet much as I didn't know, I'd never asked for clarification — even though simple hints, from Grandma's shampoo to my mother's 1st grade class picture told me I should. So there I was, a girl who thought of herself and her mother as "white," lying in the darkness next to Emma and hearing for the first time that my uncle "hated white people."

This is why I have come to despise legal forms. Medical forms, too. I become furious at those four lines. A check or an X mark in the middle of them and you're immediately classified as "one" or "the other." And I understand that it isn't to judge the person holding the pencil, but I can't imagine how many people try to count on their fingers what percentage is the largest and choose their race that way.

It's always four simple little lines. Four little lines of a check-mark box, and I'm back in a mental dilemma of "Who am I?"

It used to be easy: "Caucasian."

But when you discover that your mother attended Jim Crow schools "for Coloreds," and her brother joined the Black Panthers; when you learn that your great-uncle made history in his state as the first African-American veterinarian in Omaha (and his office is becoming a national landmark); when you read about your late grandfather, the racial "pioneer"; when you know all that, how can any of those check-marks be honest? Sure, I can freckle. And in the fall, winter and spring, I'm not especially darker in skin tone than the next "white" girl. But I know that's not the whole story.

But in the four years since my conversation with Emma, I have yet to ask my mother, "How much are we?" I don't think it matters, really, exactly how black or white I am. To me, all that matters is that I have a sense of who my family members are, or were — the jazz singer, the veterinarians, my great uncle's barbershop quartet, great aunt Caledonia "The Witch," my grandma with the degree from Tuskegee and the extravagant collection of Sunday hats. Their stories, not just their skin shades, make me who I am.

Even now, just as on the blue night when I lay listening to Emma rant, I can't bring myself to resent my mother's silence. I always think of a scar that has marked her face since she was nine. "There were some people who didn't want people like me around back then," she told me once. "It's ugly, I know." I'm not sure whether she means the scar or the playground scuffle that caused it. But either way, it helps me to understand. Running from your heritage may be less-than-noble, but my sister's spite is unfair. Maybe if my sister could imagine what it was like for my mother, she too would understand the desire to let scars fade. Grace Edwards is a pseudonym.