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  Izaiah arrived at the Spokane International Airport wearing a Hawaiian shirt tucked into high-water khaki pants and white sneakers so dirty they’d turned gray. We drove straight to a men’s clothing store so he could get some clothes that fit correctly and matched his style, then to a Black barbershop to get a haircut. After I’d gotten a home-cooked meal in him, we caught up on the events of the past several years. He told me how it always made his day whenever I included a pack of Hubba Bubba bubble gum for him in the care packages I sent when he and our siblings were living in South Africa, how he always tried to get to the phone before the others whenever I called, and how his favorite Christmas present when they were living in Georgia was the The Lion King 1½ DVD I sent.

  Izaiah’s happy memories were overshadowed by horrific ones. While we were talking, he stood up and took off his shirt. His back was crisscrossed with scars. He explained how the glue stick Larry had used to punish him and our siblings in Montana had been replaced with a rubber-tipped baboon whip in South Africa. Such a whip is used to drive cattle, kill snakes, keep aggressive dogs and baboons at bay, and, during apartheid, keep Black people in line. My precious little brother, who I’d rocked to sleep as a baby, looked like a product of the slavery era, and he wasn’t the only one. All my siblings except for Ezra bore the same scars on their backs.

  I hugged Izaiah as tears and anger blurred my vision. I could never forgive Larry and Ruthanne for what they’d done to my siblings. After seeing my brother’s back, I could no longer in good conscience claim Larry and Ruthanne as family. That concept—family—clearly meant something to me that it didn’t mean to them. To me, it meant love, trust, and safety, not neglect, danger, and abuse.

  For my own health and sanity, I severed as many ties with Larry and Ruthanne as I could while still being able to maintain contact with my siblings. I was also hesitant to completely turn my back on them due to the misguided hope that they might still harbor some love for me. My growing independence came at a price, however, as members of my extended family on both the maternal and paternal sides renounced me. Entire limbs fell off my family tree, but I wasn’t afraid or discouraged. I received more than enough love from Franklin. He was my family. And that summer Izaiah became a part of it. The three of us formed an entirely new family tree, one that had less to do with blood and more to do with shared experiences, healing wounds, and true love.

  Izaiah was seven years older than Franklin, but they bonded like brothers that summer. When I went to work, Izaiah would strap a bike helmet onto Franklin’s head, help him onto a bike held upright by training wheels, and walk him up and down the sidewalk. They’d spend hours at the park, playing on the slides and swings. Izaiah would even make Franklin lunch from time to time. PB&J sandwiches were his specialty.

  As summer was winding down, Izaiah asked if he could stay with us permanently. Franklin loved the idea, so I ran it by Larry and Ruthanne.

  They said no.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Adopting a New Dad II

  TO SUPPORT FRANKLIN AND MYSELF after the divorce, I had to rely on the poverty-induced resourcefulness I’d developed as a child. I worked in the photofinishing lab at Uncle Dan’s camera shop on and off for a year and a half. I apprenticed as a sushi chef at Bonsai Bistro, an Asian fusion restaurant located just across the street from the Coeur d’Alene Resort. And I converted styling Black women’s hair from a hobby to a job.

  A walking billboard for braids, twists, and locs, I got many of my clients from chance encounters in public. In the summer, I liked to wear braids and dreads as carefree, low-maintenance, beach-ready options. In the winter, I preferred a weave because wefts insulate the scalp, negating the need for a hat in the chilly Northwest. When Black women saw me in the grocery store or bumped into me on the street, they often complimented my hair and asked where I’d gotten it done. Most were impressed to hear that I’d styled it myself, a habit I’d adopted to save money, and asked if I could do theirs. These conversations led to a steady stream of clients and a small supplemental income for my family.

  My extensive background in art ultimately pulled me—just barely—above the poverty line, although not quite the way I’d imagined. After I finished the fountain Rodney had helped me put together, I was commissioned to paint a mural and sold a few small collages of landscapes at exhibits in Coeur d’Alene and Spokane, but the money I made from these sales wasn’t even enough to pay for my art supplies and framing. There simply wasn’t a market for Black art in North Idaho. To me, art is a conversation, and without an audience to respond to my work, continuing to put images into the world that might never be purchased or even seen didn’t make much sense. Besides, I had a kid to support. Bread and butter were more important than canvases and paint.

  As much experience as I had making art, it was an easy transition when I started teaching it. I worked as a full-time art and science teacher at a Christian prep school as well as a substitute art teacher at a magnet elementary school. In 2005, I made the jump to North Idaho College (NIC), where, as an adjunct professor, I taught illustration and design classes and, starting the following year, an art history and art appreciation course. Because I received the lowest possible pay and no benefits, I took on a similar role at Eastern Washington University (EWU) in 2007. Between the two colleges, I taught full-time but at a lower rate of pay and with less job security than full professors.

  The first course I taught at EWU was African and African American Art History, which had been revived after a five-year hiatus created by a lack of qualified teachers. I tried but failed to keep the course alive by cross-listing it with the Africana Studies Program, a department I was completely enamored with. I loved stopping by Monroe Hall, where the program was based. The faculty who had offices there and the students who could be found studying in the lobby were all Black. It was like the Black table at Belhaven, a miniature Howard, and it quickly became my favorite hangout spot on campus.

  My interest in Africana Studies was well-received. The following year, the Africana education director, Dr. Bob Bartlett, wanted to expand the program, and, after looking over my résumé and taking note of the scholarly research I’d done and the significant number of graduate credits I’d obtained—from an HBCU no less—he found several courses in his department I was qualified to teach, including African American Culture and African History. During my time at EWU, a succession of program directors came and went, but I stayed and flourished, writing the curriculum for such classes as The Black Woman’s Struggle, African American History: From 1877 to Present, and Introduction to Race and Culture Studies.

  For me, the most enjoyable aspect of working at NIC and EWU was getting to interact with the students. I mentored several of them and always looked forward to the “Aha!” moments they had when discovering African history’s impact on humanity’s broader story, the contemporary realities of racism, and the science that proves race to be a social construct with no basis in biology. At NIC, only twelve out of the approximately six thousand students were Black, but in my mind that was an argument for—not against—creating a Black Student Union. This demographic of students was so small and isolated it desperately needed a support group. After getting the Black students on campus excited about the idea of forming a BSU, I guided them through the process of making it an official student organization. Those offended by the idea soon made their opposition known, including “Anonymous,” who wrote a letter to the editor of the Coeur d’Alene Press expressing the opinion that Black people shouldn’t be allowed to congregate alone because they needed the civilizing influence of white people.

  As much as I enjoyed working on these campuses, my two part-time teaching positions, even when combined, still didn’t provide the salary or benefits of a full-time position, forcing me to take on a third job. In 2007, I got my foot in the door at the Human Rights Education Institute (HREI) by guiding an art series exploring children’s responses to the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of the Child. It wen
t so well the executive director, KJ Torgerson, asked me to stay on. Under her watch, I organized exhibits and continued to work with kids. When Bob Bennett, NIC’s former president, replaced her later that same year, he added to my list of duties, asking me to develop several new programs.

  Bennett was an older white man who wasn’t afraid to be politically incorrect. When the entrepreneur and philanthropist Greg Carr, whose million-dollar contribution helped launch the Human Rights Education Institute, paid a visit to HREI, Bennett introduced me to him by saying, “Isn’t she sexy?” On another occasion during a board meeting he turned to HREI’s secretary, Donna Cork, and asked, “Rachel’s a colored gal, right?”

  As disturbing as it was to have racist and sexist terminology used to describe me, I’d never felt more fulfilled than when I was working at the HREI. If every step toward Blackness was a step away from whiteness, I was running full steam ahead. I was a Black-Is-Beautiful, Black liberation movement, fully conscious, woke soul sista. Finally allowed to bloom, I blossomed fast, going from an unknown adjunct instructor at a community college making sushi on the side to being a prominent civil rights leader and defender of human rights in the region. I didn’t work for the Cause from the outside as a white ally, but from the inside as a Black leader, someone who was eager to not only model the philosophy of a great activist like Angela Davis but sport similarly textured hair as well.

  I wasn’t merely “passing” as a Black woman. Passing has existed in the United States as long as white people have oppressed people of color, which is to say for its entire history. Typically, it’s been light-skinned Black people who have passed for white in an attempt to accrue the same advantages white people enjoyed: to acquire gainful employment, avoid discrimination, and preclude the possibility of being lynched. But why would a white person ever want to pass for Black when doing so would involve losing social and economic benefits? One reason: love. In perhaps the best-known example of white-to-Black passing, bestselling author and famed geologist Clarence King passed for a Black Pullman porter named James Todd in order to marry a Black woman named Ada Copeland. King died before his secret was discovered, but others who have made the same leap, including Reverend L. M. Fenwick, the pastor of an African Methodist Episcopal church in Milwaukee at the start of the twentieth century, reclaimed their original racial identity after being found out. My situation was different. Just as a transgender person might be born male but identify as female, I wasn’t pretending to be something I wasn’t but expressing something I already was. I wasn’t passing as Black; I was Black, and there was no going back.

  Living as a Black woman made my life infinitely better. It also made it infinitely harder, thanks to other people’s racist perceptions of me. The Blacker I became—not just in the clothes I wore or the books I read but in terms of how I was being seen and treated—the more distant and isolated I felt from white people. It had taken me a couple years after my divorce to stop feeling obligated to check WHITE on medical forms, and once I started claiming my identity and checking BLACK, any whiteness I possessed became invisible to the people collecting the forms and even to the doctors examining the most intimate parts of my body. Due to the higher rates of HIV in the local Black community—eight times higher for Black women than white women—nurses started testing me for it every time I went to the health clinic. While getting a bikini wax, I once had an esthetician complain about my “African American hair” as she struggled with a hair that refused to be removed. On another occasion a Latina beauty consultant described my eyelashes as “nappy.” While driving, routine police stops took on a hostile feel, and I got so many traffic tickets I had to go to online driving school to keep my license.

  The microaggressions I’d once worked so hard to protect my younger siblings from were now being directed at me. Countless strangers touched (or attempted to touch) my hair, commenting about its texture or asking bizarre questions about how often I washed it or whether I even did. While I was shopping in the produce section at Albertson’s, a white man told me my hair looked like a mop. While listening to a lecture at HREI about human trafficking, a white lady sitting in the row behind me reached forward and patted my bare shoulder. “I’ve been looking at your skin all evening,” she said, “and I just had to touch it. You people have such smooth skin.” The list of racist comments and behavior I experienced could fill its own book. If I had enough energy at the time these incidents occurred, I would try to use them as teaching moments to educate people about their behavior, what they shouldn’t do and why. If I didn’t have the energy, I’d often throw out a flippant response. To people who asked, “Is that your real hair?” when I wore long faux dreadlocks, I’d say, “Some of it!” To those who asked how long I’d been growing my hair, I’d say, “My whole life!”

  As wearying as experiencing the social stigma and hardship that comes with being Black was, I didn’t regret it for a second. Beyond the police harassment and low social standing, I’d never been happier. To live as anyone but yourself is to live in a prison. To live openly as yourself—in my case, not the self that Larry and Ruthanne had defined and attempted to shape but my own self-determined existence—is to be free.

  When Bob Bennett stepped down from his position as HREI’s executive director in 2008 to retire, he recommended to the board of directors that I replace him. His endorsement made sense, as he’d been subcontracting many of his duties to me, but his support came with a discouraging and disrespectful proviso. He suggested that in the future the position should be part-time and come with a much lower salary of $24,000. Much to my chagrin, the board agreed.

  That I was young, poor, bisexual, nonreligious, Black, and female were undoubtedly factors in my being given such a lowball offer. According to the theory of intersectionality proposed by law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw in the 1980s, all members of a group aren’t treated equally. They’re discriminated against to varying degrees according to their gender, race, religion, class, sexual orientation, age, and nationality, and all aspects of their identity are inextricably linked with one another. Because of this, certain individuals can be victims of multiple forms of discrimination at once, which meant I was six steps behind the older, rich, straight, religious white man I was tapped to replace.

  Offended by the offer—every previous executive director, including Bennett, had made $70,000—I decided to negotiate. The board responded by keeping the position full-time and increasing the proposed salary to $36,000. When the secretary, Donna, who was white and had no higher education, heard the news, she threatened to quit. She told the board that she refused to make less money than me and to have to report to me. She proposed instead that we be made “co-directors,” with her as “director of operations” and me picking any title other than executive director.

  I wasn’t pleased with the way Donna handled the situation, but I also understood. She had an abusive husband and was trying to figure out how to leave him. To do that, she needed to become more assertive and empowered and to make as much money as she could. Having been in her shoes, I wanted to support her, even if that meant I had to take a hit. As a survivor of past trauma, I usually recognize when others are suffering and feel compelled to help them if I can.

  I bit the bullet and accepted the board’s revised proposal. As HREI’s “director of education,” my duties were nearly the same as those once performed by the executive director. In fact, Bob Bennett’s job description had literally been copied and pasted onto mine. Meanwhile, Donna’s role didn’t change all that much—but her salary sure did. She was given a more than $10,000 raise.

  I started working as HREI’s director of education in November 2008. It was a heady time. That same month, Barack Obama became the first Black man to be elected president of the United States. Prior to his victory, forty-three presidents had occupied the Oval Office, and every single one of them had hailed from the same demographic: white and male. Obama ended that ignominious streak in emphatic fashion, obtaining 365 out of a possible 5
38 electoral college votes to defeat John McCain. For millions of Americans, Obama’s presidency reignited a sense of hope that had nearly been extinguished by centuries of oppression. It was hailed in the media as a breakthrough, a repudiation, a national catharsis. In his victory speech at Chicago’s Grant Park, he tapped into that hope, opening with these words: “If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.” The only ones who weren’t cheering wildly were those weeping quietly.

  Oh, how I wish I could have been in Chicago to hear Obama’s speech or in DC two months later for his inauguration, but I couldn’t afford the plane fare or the time away from my new job. Despite the way the board had treated me, I was determined to excel at HREI. I was only required to work thirty-six hours a week, but, fueled by passion and commitment, I often worked sixty or seventy, even though I didn’t get paid for working overtime.

  Some of those who regularly attended the programs I created were every bit as passionate about civil rights as I was. One of them was Albert Wilkerson, a retirement-age Black man who had served as an Obama delegate in Idaho. He and I hit it off almost immediately. Despite his being nearly forty years older than me, we were alike in almost every other way. We enjoyed the same foods. We were both passionate about art and social justice. And we both enjoyed teaching others about Black history. One day, while talking about areas where Coeur d’Alene was deficient, Albert and I noted its failure to celebrate Juneteenth.

  A portmanteau of “June” and “nineteenth,” Juneteenth is a holiday that started in Texas to celebrate the end of slavery. Its origins hint at just how entrenched slavery was in the South (and how poor communications were at the time). Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation declared that all slaves in the Confederate states were to be freed starting January 1, 1863, but the news didn’t arrive in the Lone Star State, where there were more than 250,000 slaves, until June 19, 1865. When Major General Gordon Granger and his Union soldiers landed in Galveston and informed its Black community that the war was over and they were now free, former slaves danced in the streets. The celebration became an annual tradition in Texas after that, although some cities banned it from their public parks. The Black population of Houston and Austin responded by raising money, buying land, and creating so-called Emancipation Parks. The holiday quickly spread from state to state all across the country, but it wouldn’t be celebrated in Coeur d’Alene for another 144 years.