-- JinduObiofuma - 11 Apr 2016

I remember my first time going to six flags with my dad. I was young enough then that he still had his heavy accent. Truthfully, I still had mine. When my daddy spoke, he was a storyteller and a poet and a comic all at once. He could make strangers smile and he loved to make his family laugh. I remember that afternoon, jumping out of the car and running up to the trolly that would take us to the park’s main gates. My siblings followed close behind and as we clambered into the car, taking up an entire bench, we grinned at one another, barely able to contain our excitement. Our parents climbed in behind us, wheezing after running to keep us in sight. They were excited too. We had never been anywhere as cool as Six Flags before. As the trolley began to move, I jumped up and ran across the aisle to sit with my dad. I swung my legs up onto his lap and asked him what he thought a roller coaster would be like. He could tell I was more than a little nervous, so true to form, he started cracking jokes. As I laughed, I felt the tension in my belly loosen a little. Pretty soon, he had our whole family laughing in that aisle. At one point, I noticed we weren’t the only ones laughing. I looked over my shoulder at a group of white teenagers who had begun laughing with us. I smiled shyly at them, encouraging them to share in our happy moment. They didn’t smile back. Their laughter wasn’t like ours. Their faces were sneering, Maybe this was also the first time I began to study strange faces. As the trolley began to move, their laughter continued. It had an edge. One girl burst out, “oh my gosh, can you hear his accent?” In response, one of the guys attempted an accent I didn’t recognize. I watched them for while without blinking, my eyes barely skimming the top of the bench. I wondered who they were talking about. My stomach dropped to the floor when I realized they were talking about my dad. I whipped around and tucked myself back into his side. “Daddy,” I whispered. My dad, still in the middle of his routine, smiled down at me before finishing his joke. “Daddyyyyyy.” I whispered with urgency this time. “Mhm..?” “I think those people are laughing at you!” I whisper shouted. I was angry but still scared enough to whisper. Anyone bold enough to make fun of my dad was someone I didn’t want to tangle with. My dad cast a worried glance at my siblings, too busy playing amongst themselves to notice or care about anything I was whispering. Smiling only with his mouth, he cast a glance over his shoulder before looking down at me. “Sometimes you just have to ignore people like that. What they’re laughing at isn’t my business.” They were still laughing as we got off the trolley. When I think of that moment, some 13 years later, I invariably become enraged. It never fails. I will spot a face that looks nothing like those faces from long ago—faces I have no hope of ever remembering—and that anger that was yet unavailable to me on that trolley, an anger that exists very distinctly in the self I wish had existed that day, forces its way through. Even then, the anger is never fully allowed to surface. To be sure, it emerges in varying degrees, but when I recognize it for what it is, I can tamp it down to an icy arrogance. When I don’t recognize it-- when it is triggered, unchecked--it is something else. When I remember my father whispering to me on that trolley, I wonder what he was saying to himself, even as he was speaking to me. I wonder if he could recognize the novelty of my awareness. I wonder if it was control that allowed him to forestall his own angry, humiliated or even apathetic response to focus on his child. To be sure, he should have been focused on me. That moment was my rock. Upon it, I built every experience of racial humiliation.