red and yellow, black and olive

Now it's cool to be a person of color…any color, so I'm thinking I'd best get this down and out before we forget skin color mattered once…a lot.




I grew up in a part of Texas where we didn't have a race problem because we didn't have any races. We had white. People in our community who weren't white were, well, just not white. They had special names, all pejorative and none I will repeat. Use your imagination.

Every year, my elementary school had a Christmas pageant, I use the term loosely. We didn't even have enough kids to be Christmas animals. We had cardboard animals that were floppy, faded, and missing tuffs of their yarn fur. But they were trotted (hauled really) out every year.

The third grade kids who weren't quite right but had learned not to eat paste, (not to be said for the rest of us) glued on missing yarn fur and reattached tails. You couldn't tell the cow from the donkey, but that had been the case for years.

The theme of the pageant was always the same, so by the time we reached the next grade we knew all the parts for that grade. It was based on the song:

Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world.

Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight.
Jesus loves the little children of the world.

You see the problem here? In a town with only white people in it, where are they going to find any the red, yellow, and black children? OK, we had black children, but they were disqualified because they were black and went to the separate-but-equal school.

So they made do with me.

My life has not been an easy one, and it started going downhill early. I grew up in a town full of blond, brunette, and the occasional redheaded white children. I had olive skin, hazel eyes, and dark brown hair. I was already suspect on three counts.

The up-side was that I was assured a part in the Christmas pageant every year because they needed me to meet the ethnic casting requirements.

In the first grade, I was a yellow child (Japanese), dressed in a yellow and green kimono with a green obi. My mother made great costumes which was the only thing that made my public humiliation bearable.

One year I was a red child (Indian). My costume was a burlap tunic that itched like hell but had beading on it.

If you're keeping count, you know that we're down to black and white. Well, mercy! Nobody is going to ask a olive-skinned-but-on-the-records-white child to be a black child.

That year I was a gypsy. Since it isn't in the song, we don't know for sure that Jesus loves gypsy children, but my mama did. That costume was a show-stopper.

The only year I wasn't in the pageant was the Year-of-the-White-Child. They chose someone more white than I was.

By the time we ran out of colors that Jesus loved, I was in the fifth grade. I graduated to the choir. We stood on risers with a Christmas tree shape. I got to wear a red robe and a white surplice with a big floppy bow. I was heady with relief.

Mama said I looked just like everybody else...clearly not as relieved by that fact as I was.