BIRTH MARKED

Donna Dufresne

            A few years back, my ninety-one-year-old father made one of those odd confessions that come with old age when the brain wanders around in the tangled past, grasping at threads. I had just told him that I had sent in my DNA test to find out about our heritage.  I joked that when I got the test back I would tell him “I told you I was Puerto Rican”.  He laughed, of course.

It’s an inside joke after having spent much of our lifetime together in a struggle over racism. In the 60’s, we engaged in fierce arguments, as the civil rights movement marched through our living room, and riots exploded into angry retorts.  “Send them back to Africa,” my dad would grumble as if it were 1830 and he were a member of the Colonization Movement.  We egged each other on as Meat Head and Archie Bunker did later in the 70’s. I remember how that show, All in the Family astounded us as we saw ourselves on T.V.

            Race and class are the undercurrents that have carried my people through generations. The tension between the two narratives pustulate and emerge in ugly sores, and they then go underground as if they never existed, much like the post racial society we imagined we would become after President Obama was elected.

            My dad’s response to my joke was much lighter hearted than it would have been back when civil rights and racism were unwelcomed guests at the table. The unfortunate fall-out of those violent times was that it became too easy to blame racism on those people in the South. Armed with the smugness of Northern elitism, we had proof in the pictures of police dogs and fire hoses that a real racist was someone other than ourselves. And if you were like my people, who were struggling to climb that ladder toward the elite, you just stopped talking about it, unless you had an annoying pre-teen getting up in your face for every off-colored remark you made. Civil rights and racism left our living rooms when Marin Luther King Junior was assassinated. The Black Panthers and Angela Davis may have raised a few eyebrows, but white people like us were disengaged. There were other things on our plates.

When my dad started talking about his fading birthmark and the possibility that he had the blood of an African in his veins, I realized there was a conversation about bloodlines that bound us together. There were family secrets rarely discussed, festering below the surface. The question about heritage serves as a lens through which we interpret and navigate the world. He did that funny little high-pitched laugh I’ve noticed as of late when he wants to tell me something that might tether my attention and keep me from returning to my life away from him.

He said, “Heh, well, maybe we’ll find out that we’re black.  I’ve always joked – you know I have a birthmark on my inner thigh, and its dark brown. I always wondered if it was because I was part black. Grampy Dunham used to grab my hands when I was a boy and press my fingernails. He’d say, “At least there’s no nigger blood in you. You belong to my side of the family.””

“O.K.”, I thought, “That’s interesting.”  I remember that birthmark, because it was so obvious when he wore shorts in the summer or watered the lawn in his underwear.  In fact, I swear to God I had a smaller, lighter version of the same birthmark on my inner thigh, but it seems to have disappeared. Is that even possible? And if not, why did I imagine myself to have that birthmark all these years?  Was it the psychological mark of my heritage?

It’s not like I hadn’t heard that story about Grampy Dunham before.  My dad has repeated it many times in the last few years as he’s tried to rectify his long dance with the past and the short dance of his future.  I know that Grampy Dunham, was both a savior and a racist son-of-a-bitch. He was an angry man – a former blacksmith turned chauffeur and then mechanic for model T Fords. When my grandmother married a Catholic French Canadian, whose mother was a Micmac Indian, you can imagine the ire raised in his protestant Irish blood.  My father caught the brunt of that ire, being the first born child of that mixed marriage.

I was six years old when I learned that my great grandmother was an “Indian princess.” It was Crazy Uncle Bob who spilled the beans, and my mother was none too pleased, I can tell you that. My father’s brother Bob was a little “off” and you never knew when he would turn up on your doorstep and turn everything upside down. But I could not have been more elated or elevated.  Finally, even at the age of six, I had a trump card to hold over the neighborhood kids. I had real “Indian” blood beyond the sagas about cowboys and Indians we played, and that meant that I had moral authority. I can’t tell you how I had absorbed the moral truth of the “noble savage”, but somehow it had wended a path into my soul. It wasn’t long after my discovery that I began leading my friends along the secret childhood paths to China Hill as we traversed further and further from our screened porches through middle childhood.  I was convinced that my Indian blood was some kind of nobility. We collected “Indian silverneers”, triangle shaped rocks became arrowheads, and sticks riddled with bark beetles were hieroglyphics in my desperation to capitalize on my new-found heritage. It was a phase that went underground after I convinced my friends that they should eat Jack-in the Pulpit berries because they were “Indian Corn”. One of my friends ended up in the hospital because Jack in the pulpit berries are full of oxalic acid, and our tongues were pricked by a billion pins and needles, and her throat closed up, and I got in a shit load of trouble.

My childhood is riddled with the angst of race.  My mother and my brother, (may they rest in peace) were fortunate to have inherited the traits of the Irish side. Green eyes, golden locks, that particular cleft in the chin, were far more noble than the dark skinned curly locks I inherited from my father. My mother used to try to cover me up from the sun so that I wouldn’t turn dark, because just a little bit of sun would turn me into a little “papoose”. It seemed to me that she was embarrassed by my complexion. God forbid I turn out like the Dufresne side of the family.

I was reminded constantly, after every minor mistake I made or any time I contradicted my mother’s lies with my truths, that I did not belong to the good side of the family, because I looked too much like the bad side of the family. And then there was the time I overheard my mother talking about my Indian princess grandmother during one of those gossipy knitting circles, whispering that she was “black” in that wrinkled up nosed snobbery, as if it was a terrible thing.

That image has been tucked away in my psyche my whole life. I adopted myself into my Micmac Indian tribal ancestry at an early age, and often wondered if my great grandmother was in fact black. It wouldn’t be unheard of.  Many African Americans escaped to Canada in the 19^th century before emancipation. Some intermarried with the indigenous people of Canada, including the Micmac.  It’s plausible that the reason why my great grandmother was so dark skinned and tall, compared to other Micmac people, was that she was part African American.

It is true that I may have wondered about these things because at an early age I was taught that I didn’t quite belong anywhere.  There was that thing where my father couldn’t quite believe I belonged to him because I was so smart, while my mother rejected me out of the rage she held toward my father because I was too much like him. Regardless of the psychological damage my parents may have tried to impart, the only palpable scar that I can calculate is the interminable desire to find my people. At first I hyper focused on the Native American heritage. I did vision quests, sweat lodges, and dived into Native American storytelling. But I never felt recognized or welcomed by any Native American Shaman.  Although I was too dark for my mother, I’m definitely too white for them.

More peculiar, as I have gotten older, is the longing and desire to connect with African Americans. I have tried desperately to develop relationships and friendships whenever I have crossed paths with people of color. But the geography of race continues to create the great divide between us. Still, it is the desperation of my desires that makes it impossible to bridge the gap.

It turns out that my DNA test came back mostly northern European, with a speck of Scandinavian, Spanish, Iberian, and Middle Eastern (where the hell did that come from!). I share DNA with some second and third cousins I’ve never met that shows an iota of Native American and an ancestor from West Africa who appeared between 1760 and 1840. Being the life-long wanna-be that I am, I have pretty much ignored the Scotch, Irish, English thing that blaringly absorbs most of my DNA chart and zeroed in on the teeny tiny percentage shared with a cousin I don’t even know. It’s my great BINGO! My “I TOLD YOU SO!”  A comeback for a lifetime of feeling that the picture my people painted of who we are was skewed toward who we wanted to be. Like my dad, who has always questioned his heritage and wondered if he really was black like Grampy Dunham insinuated, I have been searching for my long-lost tribe. But in the end, what use is a birthmark that fades away with the stories of our ancestors? Once the stories are gone, so is the cultural connection, and we are left with the fading of skin and memory. In the end, skin tone becomes another barrier and I’m just another milk-toast white girl who doesn’t quite belong. 0