Bertice Berry - The Ties That Bind: A Memoir of Race, Memory, and Redemption

If you ask any Afro-wearing, Nikki Giovanniloving black woman born in the sixties what her greatest fear is, she will tell you that right up there with the fear of her child being pulled over by the policeman who missed his one day of diversity training is the fear of being called an Oreo, or, worse yet, a honky lover.

I grew up with proud role models like Angela Davis, Malcolm X, and Jesus. Somewhere in the mental state of what I call Negrophrenia (a term I coined to describe blacks who distrust whites, but aspire to be like them), I came to believe that all blacks were descendants of African royalty, and that all whites were directly or indirectly responsible for slavery and its repercussions on African American society. When I was younger, I had no time for howdy-do Negroes who shuffled along saying things like, Some of my best friends are white.

I was a soul sista through and through. I worked hard to make sure that no one called me an Oreo (black on the outside, white on the inside). And yet that's exactly what happened when I graduated from my all-black, separate and unequal high school in Wilmington, Delaware, and matriculated at the lily-white campus at Jacksonville University in Florida.

My college choices had been narrowed down to JU and a historically black university, Norfolk State, where I had planned to go with my childhood friend Tia and another classmate. While Tia and her parents told me that I should go to Florida, my other friend called me the names I feared most. According to him, I had turned my back on my people in favor of the white man's school. But Tia consoled me and said that I would be a fool to pass up the opportunity to see the world from the other side.

You better do the right thing, hussy, Tia said, using her term of endearment. This is a once-in-a-lifetime chance, she said. Tia knew that I had been found by a wealthy benefactor who wanted to help educate a deserving poor black student. I wasn't sure about the deserving part, but I was certainly black and poor. While Tia and her family were coaxing me to do what I considered at the time to be the white thing, my other friend told me that I was a sellout, an Oreo.

Many African Americans face the fear of being thought of as not black enough. It is this fear that sometimes moves us away from our more holistic self, a self that is connected to a world that goes beyond black and white. This fear of not being black enough kept me from looking at a much larger story, a story that was all too obvious and easy to find.

When I was growing up in Wilmington, Delaware, my mother frequently told me about her grandfather, John Henry Freeman, the man who raised her. When she was still a child, John Henry would tell her stories of his life in the mid-1800s. To her, his stories were of happy times and noble whites, something that made little sense to me as a child, and even less as I got older.

When my mother told me my great-grandfather's stories, I refused to believe them on the grounds that they simply were not black enough. The main character in my greatgrandfather's stories was white, and he was good. My beliefs about life in the 1800s did not allow this to be true, so rather than research and look for evidence, I rejected the stories completely. But life is a highway full of twists and turns. If you follow the road willingly, you'll find that the path connects itself back around to the point of origin.

Few people ever find this place; most don't even know to look.