In Full Color Page 19
Afterward, some people said I was wrong to counter the KKK protest with one of my own. They said it would have been better if I’d just ignored them. But from my experience dealing with hate groups I can tell you that ignoring them is not the best strategy. Threats that get ignored don’t go away. They fester. They gain momentum. And soon the little problem you once casually disregarded has turned into an enormous one you’ll never be able to forget.
Chapter Twenty-One
Raising Black Boys in America
AFTER LARRY AND RUTHANNE refused to allow Izaiah to live with me and Franklin, he returned to Atlanta with them. His homecoming didn’t last long. One night, as Larry and Ruthanne were clearing his bedroom of everything but a mattress and a Bible as punishment, they found the copy of The Autobiography of Malcolm X and several books by Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn I’d given him. The books were a source of inspiration and reason in a house that lacked both—he’d been forced to hide them behind a ceiling panel in his room. Now they’d been confiscated. Tired of being treated this way, Izaiah’s desire to escape Larry and Ruthanne’s household resurfaced.
More than anything, Izaiah wanted to live with a Black family, and fate seemed to have rescued him when his biological parents, Cedric and Wanda Bates, made a request through the adoption agency to meet him. They lived southeast of Chicago in Merrillville, Indiana, a town that doesn’t have the same bad reputation as nearby Gary and Chicago’s South Side do but isn’t exactly considered Pleasantville, either. Larry had a Creation Ministries conference in North Chicago coming up and offered to take Izaiah along, but he wasn’t willing to venture down to Merrillville. When I heard this, I volunteered to fly to Chicago and facilitate the process. Larry suggested we meet Cedric and Wanda at the Field Museum of Natural History, a neutral spot in the heart of Chicago, but it turned out to be a very uncomfortable place to meet someone for the first time and have any sort of relaxed conversation, so we followed Wanda’s suggestion and went to a nearby Dave & Buster’s instead.
After lunch, Larry returned to his conference in North Chicago. When Izaiah told me he didn’t feel comfortable taking off with his biological parents minutes after meeting them, I offered to go along. When he and I pulled up to the Bates’ house in Merrillville, it was like a scene lifted from the movie Antwone Fisher. All the relatives—cousins, aunts, uncles, half-siblings, grandparents—and some neighbors as well had packed themselves into Cedric and Wanda’s little house and spilled into the yard to greet Izaiah. Wanda sat with her aging mother, while Cedric manned the barbeque. There were so many people in the house it was hard to hold a conversation with anyone for more than a minute. Family trivia flew at us from all directions: Morgan Freeman was Izaiah’s fifth cousin, someone’s brother played professional basketball, one of the cousins just had a baby, and on and on.
I received just as much love as Izaiah. Wanda’s best friend Boo was particularly friendly. A light-skinned Black woman, she kept referring to me as her twin sister and took several selfies of me and her together to show how similar we appeared. Some people there said we looked exactly alike, while others mentioned how they had family members who had similar “high yellow” or “red-bone” complexions as mine—the same kinds of things I’d grown used to hearing during my time in Mississippi. The weekend we spent with the Bateses reminded me how much I missed living in a Black community. Even when the subject of the conversation was race, it never felt awkward. The Bateses had seen photos of me as a child and knew that Larry and Ruthanne were white, and yet they saw me for who I really was, making me feel right at home. “Girl,” Boo said at one point, “you’re really more Black than you are white anyway.” I didn’t disagree.
After Izaiah returned to Georgia, he and the Bateses kept asking Larry and Ruthanne to let him live in Merrillville, until they finally agreed. This was a compromise on both sides. Izaiah and I figured that living in Merrillville would be better for him than living with Larry and Ruthanne, while Larry and Ruthanne thought living in Merrillville would be better for him than living with me, the disgraced divorcée.
But the experience didn’t turn out the way Izaiah had hoped it would. After living in Merrillville for just a few months, he was on the phone with me nearly every single day, saying he felt extremely uncomfortable there. Kids at school called him a faggot for playing violin and liking baseball and teased him for being a virgin and “talking white.” Being continually compared to his biological brothers created an awkward tension that grew worse with time. Izaiah wanted out, but he didn’t want to go back to Larry and Ruthanne. He begged me to fly him to Idaho, so he could live with me and Franklin.
I called Cedric and Wanda and asked them to let Izaiah come visit me for his sixteenth birthday. I assured them it would only be for a week or two, but I’d already made up my mind: I only bought him a one-way ticket. Several weeks later, when it became clear to Cedric and Wanda that Izaiah wouldn’t be returning to Indiana, all hell broke loose. They threatened to sue me, but without legal custody of Izaiah they didn’t have any recourse. Larry and Ruthanne, however, did. Threatening to charge me with kidnapping if I didn’t return Izaiah to them, they told me they were moving from Atlanta back to Montana and were going to stop in Coeur d’Alene along the way to pick him up. I had no choice but to let him go. As I was hugging him goodbye, I shoved a cell phone into his pocket so he could talk to me whenever he wanted to.
Over the course of the next several months, I took a step back and let Izaiah figure out what he wanted to do. This was his life, after all. I wanted him to be sure about the choices he made and to feel empowered about charting his own course. He may have only just turned sixteen, but he’d been through a lot more than most people twice his age had, so I was confident in his ability to decide whatever he thought was best. When he asked me to help him petition the court for emancipation, I drove to Montana, picked him up at his high school during his lunch break, and took him to the courthouse, where he filed the paperwork. We were careful not to betray our intentions to Larry and Ruthanne, but the law thwarted our efforts. Because he’d never held a job and couldn’t support himself, Izaiah’s request for emancipation as a minor was denied. Needing someone to look after him for three more years and help him get into college, he turned to the one person who’d always been there for him ever since he was two weeks old—me.
Izaiah and I filed to have parental custody and guardianship transferred to me. He wrote a lengthy and heartfelt essay detailing his desire to be part of a family that took education seriously, was connected to the Black experience, and supported his identity as a Black male. The judge fairly shrugged. But when he described the abuse he’d experienced at the hands of Larry and Ruthanne, that got the court’s attention. And Larry and Ruthanne’s as well. They’d initially fought the custody transfer, but when the court ordered an investigator to go to Missouri to interview Esther about the abuse she’d suffered, they backed down and agreed to grant me custody of Izaiah. Had they continued to fight and the abuse been verified, I could have been awarded custody of all four of my adopted siblings. They opted to lose a battle instead of the war and moved on. Franklin had already been referring to Izaiah as his big brother for three years. Now it was official. The court awarded full custody and parenting responsibilities of Izaiah to me on December 6, 2010.
Soon after I was awarded custody of Izaiah, he and I sat down in the living room of our house and had a heartfelt conversation. After all that he’d been through during his traumatic childhood, he wanted a fresh start. Moving to a new town and enrolling at a new high school, he didn’t want to be known as a Black kid who’d been adopted by a white family or a kid who’d been adopted by his sister. Like most teenagers, he wanted to blend in. He was Black. He wanted to be part of a Black family. He told me that I was the only one who’d always been there for him, that he felt like I was his real mom, and that he wanted to start calling me that. He didn’t want to have to tell kids at his new school about Larry and Ruthanne, the adoption
s, the religious fanaticism, and the abuse.
I could feel how much the pain of his past weighed on him, and I wanted nothing more than for him to be free of it. He had all the potential in the world, and I wanted to see him realize it. Maybe our solution wasn’t typical, but his life up to this point hadn’t been, either. Together we decided it would make the most sense and raise the fewest questions—and eyebrows—to tell people that before arriving in Coeur d’Alene he’d been living with his dad in Chicago, which was technically true, and that now he was living with me, his mom, which was also technically true. We knew that people would assume we meant that I was his biological mom, and that was fine with us. The details were nobody’s business. Izaiah had described to me a life that would make him happy, that would allow him be a normal kid, and I was happy to help create that for him. I hugged him, then clasped his shoulders and looked him in the eye. “Welcome home, son.”
Within the spectrum of skin color created by the amount of melanin one possesses, Izaiah was mid-tone in complexion and Franklin was light-skinned. When people asked me if they had different dads, I’d say, “Yes, Izaiah looks like his dad and Franklin looks like me,” another true statement that could only be construed as a lie by people who were making certain assumptions. It was a clever way of telling the truth without spelling out all the details. I thought of it as “creative nonfiction.” It made sense to the three of us, and in the end that’s all that mattered to us. Izaiah had made it clear that he wanted to be part of a Black family, and with Franklin as his brother and me as his mother, that’s exactly what we were.
Before that conversation, I’d often, but not always, worn my hair in traditionally Black styles, and I hadn’t paid much attention to my skin color beyond sunbathing on the shores of Lake Coeur d’Alene in the summer. After that conversation, I never wore my hair straight or unaltered in public, and I consciously maintained some warmth of color in my skin, whether through sunbathing or bronzer sprays. I’d already been identified by the media and other people as Black or biracial countless times, so it wasn’t hard for me to go one step further and fully commit to a look that made visual sense to people who knew me as Izaiah’s mom.
This was the final piece of the puzzle surrounding my identity. I now felt completely free and secure in who I was. I’d learned to love myself and trust myself and do whatever I felt was right instead of doing what I felt others expected me to do. I’d finally claimed the identity I’d always felt was true to who I was, and in the process I distanced myself from anyone who’d known me as a child and made an entirely new set of friends and connections. Although there were some challenging days, it was still the happiest time of my life. While I was helping Izaiah shed the cocoon that had been holding back his growth, he helped me blossom into who I really was.
The joy of being Izaiah’s mother, legally and practically, was mitigated by the fear of having to raise him in a place like North Idaho. At the start of third grade, Franklin returned home from school with a disappointed look on his face. “Mom, I’m the only Black kid in my class again,” he said.
“I thought there were two girls in your class who are biracial.”
He sighed. “It’s not the same. They don’t know they’re Black.”
I understood what he meant. Most of the Black kids you came across in Idaho were usually either biracial—often being raised by a white mom with an absent Black dad—or had been adopted by white parents. While they may have appeared Black, culturally they were being raised with a white mindset. These kids tended not to know any Black history, were ill-informed about Black culture, and weren’t offended by racial slurs, including the N-word.
That’s not how I raised Franklin, and while I believe it was the right thing to do, it also made living in an all-white area more complex for him. His attitude as much as the color of his skin made him a habitual target of racism. He was called a “monkey” and, during one bitter winter day, a “Black snowman.” A white classmate, who had undoubtedly overheard someone talking about wanting to kill President Obama, once told Franklin that if Franklin ever became successful he’d hunt him down and “assassinate” him. Another classmate, also white, picked up Franklin and threw him over his shoulder one day, causing Franklin to hit his head on some concrete and get a concussion. The kid who caused the injury wasn’t punished or even made to apologize.
On another occasion, four white kids held Franklin down during recess and kicked him in the gut, but the only one who got in trouble was the kid who’d uttered racial slurs as he was doing it. His punishment? He had to walk one lap around the playground. After hearing about the incident, I stormed into the school and—no doubt being viewed as an Angry Black Mom—was made to sit and wait for over thirty minutes so I could “calm down” before the principal would see me.
During a field trip with his class, Franklin was standing on the side of a road when a white kid pushed him, causing Franklin to lose his balance and nearly fall into oncoming traffic. The result? The teacher wrote Franklin up for “violent/aggressive behavior.” Knowing that tagging little Black boys with a violent label was the first step in the school-to-prison pipeline, I raised hell at his school until it was expunged from his record. After failing to get any sort of apologies or justice after these incidents, I reached out to the NAACP for help, but to no avail. The sad reality in that part of the country was that, when it came to their education or even their safety, Black kids simply weren’t a priority.
The anxiety I felt about Franklin’s welfare extended beyond school. One day I took him to an orientation session for a Cub Scouts troop he wanted to join. I sat at a table with all the other parents as the troop leader went over the basics of Scouting. As I looked around the table at the other parents, my eyes locked on a man with a shaved head and lots of piercings who looked oddly familiar. When he saw me looking at him, he nodded in a way that made it clear that he knew me. Where did I know him from?
As he passed the sign-in sheet to me, he said, “Just write your current address and phone number on this line,” then rolled up his sleeve to make sure I didn’t miss the large swastika tattoo on his pale, meaty forearm. His voice and the tattoo hit me like a bucket of ice water dropped on my head. He was one of the neo-Nazis who’d threatened me at HREI three years before. I felt momentarily paralyzed, then my stomach tensed as I glanced around the room. Everyone was white. I was the outsider here, not him.
Not wanting anyone to see how badly I was shaken, I excused myself from the table and ducked into the bathroom to compose myself. I was on the verge of tears but also determined to expose this man. Taking a deep breath, I returned to the meeting room where I took the troop leader aside, told him about the incident at HREI, and explained why I felt that Franklin, and possibly other children of color, wouldn’t be safe in this man’s presence. The troop leader smiled at me and explained that they were an inclusive troop, which meant that it included parent volunteers as well as children from all backgrounds, whether they be people of color or neo-Nazis. The man with the swastika tattoo and his son had been members the previous year and the Scouts had had no problems with them. I started to explain that being inclusive of hate was by definition not being inclusive, but I could see by his smug smile that I wasn’t getting anywhere, so why bother?
I found Franklin in the kids’ playroom and told him something had come up and we needed to go. During the car ride home, I explained the situation to him as best as I could. I apologized that he had to grow up in a part of the country that was so alienating for Black people, and I let him vent. He told me he hated that his friends didn’t have the same worries he did. His life basically sucked. He was a Black kid in North Idaho with a mom who was passionate about human rights, and, as far as making and keeping friends went, what could be worse than that?
I understood his pain because I felt it, too. I wished we could live somewhere he could be a Cub Scout without me having to worry about his safety, but the court wouldn’t allow us to move more than thirty
miles away until he was eighteen. In the meantime, I was determined to never back down from the fight I’d started to think of as my life’s purpose. The struggle to attain equal rights for all wasn’t an abstract subject for me but a description of my sons’ daily lives.
Huddled between me and his cat October, Franklin slept in my bed that night, a habit he’d developed ever since he’d nearly been abducted from his school two years before. I remained awake long after he’d fallen asleep, listening to the walnut tree branches scratching at the window in the wind and cherishing the faint puff of his breath on my shoulder.
As stressful as it was to raise Franklin in that environment, raising Izaiah there was even more nerve-racking. He had entered that critical age—too young to know how to fully take care of himself but too old to be seen as an innocent child by most white people—that makes mothers of Black sons toss and turn in their beds at night.
Having seen studies that suggested that nice clothes might be a defense against racial profiling, I encouraged Izaiah’s budding interest in fashion, buying him shoes and clothes whenever I could afford to—and many times even when I couldn’t. He had a great sense of style, and it paid off in the way people responded to him. The better he was dressed, the nicer they treated him. He was voted Best Dressed in his high school, but for him, maintaining a nice wardrobe wasn’t fueled by vanity alone. It was an act of self-respect as well as survival. To this same end, I didn’t let him stay out late or party. As a Black boy, it simply wasn’t safe for him to be out on the streets at night in Idaho, where people openly carried guns, proudly displayed them on racks in their trucks, and weren’t afraid to use them.