The Story I Wanted: Once Upon a Time When We Were Colored

When ever it was "hair braiding weekend"--which was when my mother would do hair for my younger cousins and sister in our Harlem apartment--a movie was always put on to keep the attention of the little ones. My mother had done this for me and Whole Sister when we were small but it was mostly sci-fi movies like Star Wars or Terminator and were played on VHS tapes. Of course my cousins came over and watched movies on DVDs (those young people LOL.)

Unless it was this movie, Once Upon a Time When We Were Colored. It has a great cast by the way. Here's the trailer:



I really liked this movie and read the memoir it's based on by Clifton L. Taulbert. As a matter of fact I loved this movie so much as a kid that once I started searching for identity ethnic-wise, I wanted this story to be my story. I wanted my family to have come from a small town like this and have pulled together to fight racial injustices. I wanted them to have come North because they knew it was better and have relatives "down south" who could share stories with me about their experience to make me stronger. To me this was blackness and I wanted to connect to this story in all sorts of ways. I wanted to feel this same type of pride and righteousness--hell I even wanted to know what churches my family were connected to without ever being Christian.

I started questioning when I was around eleven. I asked my mother, I asked my grandmother, I wanted to talk to my maternal great-grandmother because they were black women and they were raising black children so I wanted to know.  My great-grandmother was born in (South?) Carolina but came to New York when she was a baby. And her mother was a native woman and her father was from Barbados. Then I asked my grandmother if she had visited relatives down south or boycotted buses in Alabama. No, because she was in New York and in Harlem and the Bronx and Brooklyn and there were different things going on. Furthermore, her father's family were Barbadian-Irish and they owned businesses in Mount Vernon, New York and she was mostly raised by her Native grandmother. (Blackness score: zero.)

I was disapointed when I realize their stories were nothing like the ones I imagined most black people to have. It was around this time that I was going to school in Harlem and was teased about not being black enough, and that I was a foreigner and not an American. I always thought we were supposed to have the same narratives as black people, it's what made us the "race" we were. I started emulating blackness and spoke of myself as being black to the general population, claiming African roots and what not. It was easier when I got to high school since most of the students at the school were Asians and called me black anyway. It wasn't until the summer of my junior or senior year of high school when I was spending the time upstate with my great-grandmother. She was sorting through her photo albums and my cousins and I were helping her. We came across a lot of pictures of her really young, with her poofy red hair and brown skin standing in front of a sign at Coney Island that said "Now open." You look so pretty Big Nana! I remember saying. Well that was me at Coney Island, she replied. It's when they first started allowing black people in.

I was shocked, at how casually she said it and the fact that my beloved childhood place of Coney Island had been segregated. This is in Brooklyn for fuck's sake, I thought shit like that only went down in the South! And that's what made me realize that my family had been in New York for a few generations and it was not a promise land. There may not have been KKK members openly running around midtown, but schools were segregated, my great-grandmother hadn't been allowed to be a certain kind of nurse for a long time, whites moved out of Harlem specifically because they did not want to live near blacks, and while my grandmother did not follow Martin Luther King she looked up to Malcolm X. This was here, in New York and what folks like my grandmother were a part of. She was right, different things were happening. Unlike the Black Southern Narrative, I noticed that the New York one included different people that weren't just black and white; Puerto Ricans and Blacks were a close-knit community at one point because they both wanted the same things for their people. (Which as a side, explains why my grandmother was happy and neither surprised that I've ended up with Mr. Smooth, and why the people she was friends with when I was a kid were mostly Black and Puerto Rican mixes, and why I referred to these friends as titi-and-tio-so-and-so.)

So while this is a great movie that I hope people watch, and many folks can connect with it because of their roots I can't and that's okay. It doesn't make me any less a colored person and doesn't take away from my family's experiences. I like southern foods but it was never a staple and it's okay that I prefer Caribbean food more. It's cool that my family are "Yankees" and made it do what it do here and that I'm acknowledging being mixed. So I'd say I have a few more points on my blackness scale.