Cohodas Literary Prize February 27
Loss of Innocence
In many African American works of literature the author presents a moment when a main character suffers a “loss of innocence.” It usually occurs in childhood, between the ages of 7 and 9. For racial and ethnic minorities the loss of innocence is not a giggled whisper about sex, but a painful realization that they are “different,” and they will be punished for it by the dominant, usually white society. Yet racism and bigotry are not limited to whites, and neither is the “loss of innocence.” In a very sick twist of life, hate is color blind.
I learned this fact in New Mexico, when I was about 9 years old. I am as white as a ghost with blue eyes and I can’t tan with my red-tinted hair. In the same way that the sunlight scorches my skin, the bigotry in New Mexico burned away my innocence.
Before moving to New Mexico I lived with my family in Oklahoma. The school there was filled with caring, warm-hearted teachers that taught me how to read. The purest joy for me was in a well-shaped letter that fit between the lines, and understanding how to spell new vocabulary words. A learning unit on the oceans in the second grade left me in awe. I longed to see water that stretched to the horizon while I felt real sponges and corals that our teacher brought in for us. Not only did school in Oklahoma teach me academically, but for the first time I was making friends and learning about people. The school system was well-integrated and one of my closest friends was a young African American girl named Courtney. Her hair was always pinned up in the neatest pigtails and braids. The clips were brightly colored and so much more attractive than my own loose, uncontrolled hair. I begged her to let me touch it and felt the differing texture, and the oil used in it. I didn’t like the oil, but I admired her hair, the uniqueness of it as compared with my own plain Jane style.
With Courtney there was no race. There was only her hair and her smile, which I envied too because she was braver than I was and had already lost her baby teeth in the front by wiggling them out. The first time I ran into any kind of racial awareness was with an African American boy whose name I can’t recall. We rode the same bus and I knew early on that he didn’t like me, but I didn’t understand why. When I pulled down my sleeve to scratch my shoulder this boy yelled at me. He was more aware than I was of our differences. Indignantly he told me how wrong it was of me to expose my bare shoulder in such a way. I explained that I had an itch, but he wouldn’t hear anything of it. His reluctance to listen to me was confusing, even troubling, but I was the sort of child that didn’t dwell on difficulty except to try and fix it. I resolved right then to make him be my friend.
I spent time with him on the bus and sat next to him during our music class. He tried to tell me that I couldn’t talk to him because I was a girl, and there was something else too that he couldn’t articulate to me. At the time I was incapable of understanding race. This boy told me we were supposed to be enemies, and I refused to listen. He was insistent, but so was I. I wanted to make him my friend, so I talked to him with the same patience and willpower that allowed me, at five years old, not to scratch a single chickenpox sore.
Looking back I know the main difference between us was that he had already learned race and gender in a way I would not for several more years. My parents purposefully gave me no lessons on race. I grew up in a box, and when I saw people with skin colors other than my own, I reacted with fascination rather than bias. I hope this boy did not encounter his “loss of innocence” from our school and our classmates, but instead absorbed the information from his parents as a warning. I hope he discovered that their warnings did not always prove true. It is saddening to think his parents felt he needed such a warning, and though their intention was for his benefit, to prepare him for potential racism and bigotry in school, it set a wall between him and other students like me with no preconceptions on race.
By the time my family moved away, when I was halfway through second grade, that little boy and I were friends. I left behind a whole classroom of friends and acquaintances, the only time in my life I have been socially popular and confident. I remember the satisfaction I felt when this boy gave in and started talking to me, when he could smile back at me. I hope that I gave him back some of the innocence he’d lost. Perhaps one day he will do as my parents did and let his child go to school with as few preconceptions as possible, to see as long as they can with innocent eyes.
I came to New Mexico with this past behind me, shaping me. I was naïve and gentle-natured, but I entered a population where my peers were mentally older and jaded. They were too young, like the boy from Oklahoma, to articulate their dislike with racial slurs, but they knew I was their enemy as surely as they knew a cactus has thorns.
The elementary school that brought on my own “loss of innocence” was a tiny single-story building made of blue-painted adobe. It was called San Lorenzo. The school in Oklahoma had been well-integrated with white and African American students, but the ethnic background in southern New Mexico was unlike anywhere else I had ever lived. I was surrounded by a different culture, Hispanic culture. There were three other white girls in my class in the third grade, and that number included me. By the time I reached fifth grade the number had fallen to two white girls, again including myself. I arrived with innocent eyes, but the other girls in my class were distant in a way I had never experienced before. The silent wall stood between us, as it had with the boy in Oklahoma, but this time no one explained it. The hatred and judgments were unspoken.
I was teased unmercifully. Everything I said and did was ridiculed. When I tried to speak to the nonwhite girls in my class they sneered at me or laughed at what I had to say. To get rid of me they spoke in Spanish to each other. Unable to understand, I gave up and did what was expected of me by playing only with the other white girls in class. My first friend was a girl named Heather. She was hotheaded and a liar. When the boys or the other girls taunted us Heather got so angry that spit shot out when she was screaming insults or defending herself. The other white girl in my class was Carla. She was skeletally thin and distant, even cold to me. We talked but were never close. I can’t remember ever seeing her smile.
My only true friends in New Mexico during the three years I lived there were Karen and Greg. Karen was not truly white by ancestry, but the Hispanic girls hated her because she was fair-skinned with blonde hair and freckles. Karen was feisty like Heather, but she wasn’t a liar. Her grandmother was a redhead, but she was truly Spanish. Her tortillas were homemade and smelled delicious even to a picky little white girl like me who refused to eat any spicy Mexican food at all. My other friend was a boy named Greg that rode my bus and walked home with me almost daily. He had the dark hair and brown eyes that should have assured him status in our school, but instead Greg was bullied as much or more than I was because he was a “mestizo” with one parent being white, the other Hispanic. He was a cute boy with a funny laugh and he beat me in every game of tag. Once, when it snowed in the winter, we sledded down the huge hill next to our houses. They were both older than me and when I left fourth grade they had graduated from San Lorenzo completely and headed for the middle school in Deming.
Even though I was caught in this environment, surrounded by Spanish food, language, and the mixed Mexican-American culture of the region, it took me a long time to realize why I was treated the way I was. I thought of it as being my fault until fourth grade when my parents and my sisters started realizing that we had not changed in moving from one place to another, the social attitude of the world had. We were the minority in New Mexico and yet we were viewed as the oppressors and hated. For the first time in my life my parents began making racial comments. My dad used the slur “wetback” to describe my classmates and people he worked with who sneered at him for his whiteness. We began to chafe as a family under the constant hostility.
Worst of all was what happened to me academically. The child who had been filled with awe and reverence for life and learning in the second grade disappeared. I lost her in the sea of sneering faces, in the endless Spanish chattering that became my enemy. I did not arrive in New Mexico educated in race, bigotry, or hate of any kind, but my classmates taught me well. I began to hate them, and all of their culture.
The school had a bilingual policy, though I’m not sure why. Most of my classmates spoke Spanish fluently at home and at recess. Bilingual class seemed to me to be an excuse to force me to submit to their culture, to embarrass me because I couldn’t roll my R’s. I held English close to me and I purposefully lost my homework in Bilingual class. I boasted to my parents when I got a D. That was the only time I ever rejoiced in a bad grade, the only time I viciously turned away knowledge with scorn.
In fourth grade my teacher started having us say the Pledge of Allegiance to the American flag in Spanish. I was so disgusted and appalled that I told my dad and he wrote a letter to this teacher, requesting in a hard, legal tone that the Pledge be recited only in English. The language of the United States was English, not Spanish. I can still remember this teacher’s face as he glared at me over my dad’s letter and I knew even then what he was thinking of me and my family. We were the white oppressors, the bigots. It was that silent snarl, that disgust, which finally drove me into my own loss of innocence. I knew how he and my Hispanic classmates saw me, and I knew I could never make them, or anyone, see that I had started out clean and pure. I knew he and my classmates were punishing me because of my race.
The last, and most powerful racial memory I have of New Mexico came when a counselor visited the classroom. He stood in front of us talking, trying to get us to vent out our emotions on race. At first everyone was reserved and quiet. Then it was as if he had thrown grenades into a campfire. A boy named Sly jabbed his finger at where Carla and I, the only white girls in the class, were sitting. He told the counselor that we were filled with hate, that we were holding other races down. I was so furious when I heard him accusing us that I tried to shout over him. I looked to the counselor and said, “It’s them!” I tried to tell him that we were the victims, the discriminated minority in this area and in that classroom, but the counselor ignored my outburst. I was white. I could not be a victim.
The adolescent in these memories is a different girl, completely changed from the one that befriended an African American boy in Oklahoma. I was angry, embittered, and hateful. Perhaps those emotions showed through too clearly to the counselor and that was why he ignored what I had to say, but even now, far removed from New Mexico, I feel it is taboo to suggest that I was a victim. It is taboo to say that nonwhites can be filled with hate. I try to put into words the story of my experience, but always I am aware that because of my heritage the message may be skewed or lost.
After I moved away from New Mexico in a long car ride all the way to Minnesota, I started over. Leaving the bigotry behind was difficult. I expected to be ridiculed by the kids in my new school, but after I got over being the new girl my classmates opened up to me. I developed friendships and tiptoed my way toward finding confidence. In high school I took a year of Spanish to symbolically face my past. I had rejected that knowledge when it was force-fed into me, but I didn’t want to hold that grudge against the language and culture. I replaced the D in fourth grade with an A as a freshman, but some of my scars run very deep and are harder to treat.
Hate is color and race blind. It arises in every region and culture and takes on many guises. It can hurt anyone. Over and over I think back to when I was in first and second grade, to Oklahoma when I had my innocent eyes. If my classmates in New Mexico had been raised without the influence of race as I was, would they still have hated me as their white oppressor? All racial stereotypes and preconceptions are learned and passed on, propagated by hatred. Every time I speak a Spanish word or recall a memory from New Mexico, I strive to cover it with my innocent eyes, to stop the cycle of hate. I think about the boy in Oklahoma and hope that I have helped in that tiny way to repeal the stereotype on my own race as ignorant, uncaring oppressors.