Kermit Frazier - First Acts: A Black Playwright Comes of Age

Turn around, Kermit.

And so I had. Me looking like a waif in that sepia photo, despite my being surrounded by three generations of one side of my family: my paternal great-grandmother, my paternal grandfather, an aunt and an uncle, and my dad. All of them smiling easily, almost cockily. The keen and quiet confidence of a middle-class Black family in Washington, DC. Or more precisely Anacostia, a section of Southeast DC.

But in that fascinating photo my relatives smiles are essentially atmospheric, a strongly ambient background glow. The foreground is inadvertently reserved for me, the shy, rather reticent subject of the photograph.

Author at Thanksgiving table in 1954 with (seated from left) Grandpa Frazier and Great Grandma Ford and standing (from left) Uncle Leo, Aunt Evelyn, and Bernard, authors father.

Turn around, Kermit, someone must have said. Probably my mom, a camera forever at her disposal, strapped both to her sensibilities and her immutable need to preserve.

Kermit. A name my father had given me because he knew someone by that name and liked it.

Turn around, Kermit.

And I had dutifully obeyed, turned my head as I sat sternly in my chair, hands together under the table between my legs, a glass of milk waiting on the table near my still-empty platea glass etched with a cute little white boy, hobo stick in hand, marching insouciant, probably down some country road. My glass.

I look pliant and nave, with sweet lips and a kind of gaze in my eyes that suggests a combination of wonder, need, and incipient fear. A look, however, thats shaded and shadowed by a curious kind of grownup gravity on my brow.

Its the fall of 1954. And judging from the fat, luscious turkey that graces the festive-looking dining room table, were posing at Thanksgiving. Our house. Although I have no idea where my younger brother Dennis and younger sister Sheila are. Perhaps at the other end of the table. In any event, theyre missing in the photo.

Its a house that my parents rent from my fathers father. George Frazier first lived there with his family before moving down the street to still another house he had built. Grandpa, head cocked and looking away from the camera, is seated to my immediate left. And then theres my dad, standing behind his grandmother, leaning with his left elbow on an old, low-rise wooden China cabinet. Cool, calm, collected, and less in direct light than any of us. He appears even more handsome, more provocative and hip, than he normally doeslooking as though he were an on-the-road jazz musician deigning to visit his family over the holidays, the bold bebop of Charlie Parker ever looping in his head.

As for eight-year-old me? Well, I wonder whats looping through my head. I wonder why I appear so lonely, so alone, in this fine, familial, before-gracing-the-table scene. I long to melt into the picture, to be that Negro kid at that precise moment once again. But in critical ways all I can do is lookstare and stare into my eyes peering back at the camera and beyond.

How many such pictures generate as much longing as they do details? How many such photographs do we have of ourselves growing up: frozen in time or ever looping through our minds; pressed into albums or fixed in our memories yet ever suing for realignment; faded by exposure, or hidden behind others, or as crystal clear as the light of some new day, some new discovery? How many ways do we have of seeing our past selves, how many aspects of perception? What, in fact, is the right, or at least the best, way to piece the puzzle of self?