CANCER

The first time I realized that my Dad is a little bit racist, I was seventeen. That might seem like a relatively old age to reach that realization at, especially since all of those years were spent living with him, but all of those years were also spent with a mother who was ever vigilant in shushing Dad if he so much as grumbled something derogatory towards an ethnic group while within my earshot. I grew up a sheltered only child, even kept in the dark about Dad’s skin cancer until I noticed the skin grafts and asked about them in the 12th grade.

That evening, I had somehow become trapped on the sofa, caught between my parents and their questions – or rather, Mom’s questions and Dad’s attention – concerning my date to the senior prom.

“What’s his name?” Mom asked. “How old is he?”

I stared at the television screen and tried not to sound exasperated.

“I’m going with Brandon. He’s a sophomore.”

“Does he like you?”

“No, Mom! You know Brandon, he’s the kid Ashley and I befriended last year. We’re joking that we’ll both walk through Lead Out with him since Ashley doesn’t have a date.”

“Do you like him?”

“We’re going as friends. No, I do not. And I’ve told you all of this already, twice,” I pointed out, though I knew what she was doing. I didn’t feel very comfortable telling Dad about any plans involving boys, even boys who were friends; his responses were always grunts of varying lengths and I could see the mental inventory of his hunting arsenal going on behind the blue eyes. She was drawing out information for his benefit.

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Joanna Roberts is an aspiring writer from Eatonton, Georgia. Roberts may be contacted at jr01984@georgiasouthern.edu.

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“So whose car are you going in?”

“I don’t know yet, it’s a month away,” I said, and stood up. As I tried to escape into the kitchen, Dad got out of his recliner and walked down the hallway for something. Mom followed me.

“Okay, I was just wondering. I thought maybe you and someone else could carpool.”

I turned around in the kitchen doorway, the linoleum covered floor creaking beneath me, and tried really hard not to sound irritable. “Well yeah, we probably will. Some people are going in limos but I think that’s too much.”

I could see that she had another question and fell silent, wondering why she looked like she was having a hard time phrasing it. Finally she asked, “Is he white?”

“Yes,” I snapped. “Wait…what?”

“Oh, it doesn’t matter,” she said, visibly relieved. “I was just talking to your Dad earlier, and I think his worst fear is that your date is black.”

*

This past winter, a cousin of mine from Holland sat in a coffee shop with me and our friend Michael, a black homosexual who I had known since we were in kindergarten.

“I don’t see why it’s still relevant here,” she said. “I mean, shit happened, but it was over a hundred years ago, right?”

I exchanged glances with Michael, who was sipping at his hot coffee. “Slavery, yes,” he said, his voice as high an octave as mine and usually five times as enthusiastic. His was perfect for the color line in Georgia Southern University’s marching band. “We had a whole war over that.”

“It’s not so much slavery, though,” I began to explain. “There were still laws of segregation until the 1950’s and ‘60’s, so people are still alive who grew up with things like Jim Crow laws, which prevented blacks from going into the same facilities as whites, like movie theaters and restaurants.” I pointed through the wall to the opposite side of the street, in full educational-mode.

“The old theater over there used to have two entrances. One led into the main part, and the other opened to stairs that went up to the balcony. That’s where you’d have to sit if you were black.”

“Ah, see, I didn’t know that,” Linsey said. “I didn’t know all of that stuff was so recent.”

*

Until May 17th, 1954, schools were on the list of places blacks and whites did not mingle. On that day, the Supreme Court ruled that “separate but equal” education was unconstitutional in Brown v Board of Education of Topeka. The ruling would eventually mean that “separate but equal” was unconstitutional in all instances.

On May 17th, two years later, a red-headed baby named Danny Lee Roberts was born in Georgia. When he was nearly four, four black college students sat-in at a lunch counter in North Carolina. In 1961, when he was five, President Obama’s parents married at a time when less than one in a thousand newlyweds were a black and white couple. When he was seven, television recorded the infamous scenes of fire hoses and police dogs being used against peaceful demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama. Martin Luther King, jr., delivered his speech in Washington, D.C., that August. The next year the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited all discrimination of any kind and gave the feds the power to enforce desegregation, was passed. And on June 12th, 1967, when Danny Roberts was ten, the Supreme Court ruled in Loving v Virginia that preventing interracial marriage was unconstitutional. The solid South made up the fifteen states that still enforced that law until the ruling.

In 1980, one year before Danny Roberts would marry my mom and ten years before he would become ‘Dad’, the Pew Research Center estimates that one in 150 couples were made of a black and a white person. In 2008, the year the Pew Research Center pulled statistics from to use in their 2010 report on interracial and inter-ethnic marriages, the frequency had more than doubled to one in sixty. It was also in 2008 that Dad had to have skin grafts when skin cancer was removed from one of his arms.

*

“I’m worried for you,” Mom said. She was flustered, and wouldn’t stop moving around the jewelry racks in Belk, the department store she had worked in since college. “Because of Dad.” She shot me a look. “You know he won’t like this.”

“I know,” I muttered. “But, Jason and I just started dating again last week. I’m not going to worry about it; we’ll see what happens and I’ll deal with it when I need to. Now, I’m going to go look at flip-flops. I’ll see you when you finish work.”

She sighed and left the subject alone. I walked away, my ragged flip-flops slapping the white tiles more assuredly than I felt. I had never told Dad about the first time Jason and I dated, a brief three month period that happened two years previous, when I was a college freshman.

The Pew Research report says that two decades after Loving v Virginia, 48% of the public thought that it was okay for blacks and whites to date each other. 83% found it acceptable in 2009. Young adults today almost unanimously think it’s okay – 93%, compared to the 68% of adults 64 or older who are okay with it. I didn’t see percentages of adults aged 55 in the report, but only one of them matters in my life anyway. And I know his view on the subject.

*

I sat on a lumpy faux leather couch in one of countless student-oriented apartments in the college town of Statesboro, Georgia. We were waiting for a friend’s movie to end so we could take over the television and play Modern Warfare. My left hand was entwined in Jason’s long fingers, mine pale and freckled in contrast to his hazelnut skin. Though in body I look like my Mom did at my age, I inherited my Dad’s coloring of reddish hair, blue eyes, and fair skin that freckles in the sun; but thankfully, not his cancer.