Hill - Black berry, sweet juice: on being black and white in canada

It is common to the point of being a clich for a black person to want to connect with other black people.I learned this in my earliest childhood.Whenever my father walked through a supermarket in the Toronto suburb of Don Mills, with or without my white mother, he would smile or nod his head or stop to chew the fat if he bumped into someone, even a complete stranger, who was black.When we were driving in the car, he would erupt from time to time with Hey, kids, look, theres a black bus driver! This came, of course, from his leaving the largely black city of Washington, D.C., and moving in the early 1950s to Toronto, where, as Dad has said, you could walk all day and not see a black person.He taught me the importance of connecting with other black people, especially when there were so few of us around.

I did see some black people from time to time when I was growing up: at family gatherings in the States, or when our relatives came up to Toronto to visit the Canadian Hills, as they called us; when we visited special family friends once or twice a year; here and there on the street, by accident.I came to look forward to those occasional intersections with black folks.I felt some confidence that if I approached a black person with an open, smiling face, Id end up in an interesting, friendly conversation.Indeed, I once carried that trusting sense of affinity to an absurd extreme when I was travelling in Utrecht, a city in the Netherlands.It was 1974, I was seventeen, I had a Canadian flag stitched onto my knapsack, and I somehow managed to get myself completely lost downtown, without any idea how to find my way back to the youth hostel where I was staying.What was I to do, without a word of Dutch?

I stood on a street corner for a few minutes, contemplating my fate, when suddenly, across the street, I noticed a tall black man who looked to be in his mid-twenties.I walked right over to him and asked, straight up, Hey, man, Im totally lost, could you tell me ? He put his hand up, smiled and began telling me, in French, that he did not speak English.It turned out that he was a foreign student from Zaire.Although I switched over to French and got the directions I needed, I felt colossally idiotic for having assumed that because this man was black, he would speak English.He seemed quite indulgent and was perhaps touched to see a young North American black kicking around Holland on his own.We repaired to the closest bar, where he bought me a beer.It turned out that we did have much to yak aboutwhat life was like for African students in Europe at the time, and what it was like for blacks in Canada.

From my earliest years, then, I was seeking out links with black folks here and there, wherever I could find them.But several decades would pass before I beganwith the research for this bookto make a concerted effort to meet people who, like me, were of mixed race.People with one black and one white parent.It was unusual for me to see black people in the 1960s in Don Millsoutside the walls of my own house, at leastand I never saw people of mixed race.I discovered, very early, that some people had strange ideas about the children of interracial unions, and seemed inclined to believe that life for us would be miserable.Indeed, when I was twelve, my best friend was a white girl who looked sixteen.We must have been a funny-looking set of friends because when I was twelve, I looked about eight.In any case, Marilyn (as I shall name her) and I formed a fast friendship, and she bonded immediately with my fatherperhaps because she had no relationship whatsoever with her own.Marilyns mother would embarrass the dickens out of me by singing my praises to her own children.Look how well Larry does in school.Why cant you be like that, Marilyn? These comments, which made me squirm and wish I could vanish from their home, at the same time elicited my profound sympathy for Marilyn.But astoundingly, this same mother who thought I was doing so well once took me aside and said, Frankly, Larry, dont you think it is terrible, mixing races like that? It ruins the children! How are they to make their way in life? It helped that I had a touch of arrogance as a twelve-year-old and thought this woman ignorant.Much better to believe that she was ill-informed than to feel hurt by her comments.I told her that she was imagining problems that werent there.

Connecting with black people in a land with few clustered black communities has been a lifelong journey for me.Connecting with people with one black and one white parent, as I did while researching this book, was a completely new experience.We had a great deal to say to each other.And I found a great deal to write about.

One of the first things I discovered is that my own experience of race, including my concept of my own racial identity, is shaded quite differently from that of my parents.They were both born and raised in the United States, and their racial identities were clearly delineated all their lives.The America of their youth and early adulthood was replete with laws that banned interracial marriages and upheld segregation in every domain of public life.One of the most personally telling details came to me from my mother, who was working as a secretary for a Democratic senator when she met my father in Washington, D.C., in 1953: When I started dating your father, even the federal government cafeterias were segregated. In the United States, there was never any doubt that my father was first and foremost a black man.Or that my mother was a white woman.And there is no question that, had my siblings and I been raised in the United States, we would have been identifiedin school, on the street, in community centres, among friendsas black.

But my parents threw their unborn children a curve ball.They came to Toronto right after they married, had us, and we all stayed here.They had had enough of racial divisions in their country of birth.And although they spent their lives at the forefront of the Canadian human rights movement, they were also happy and relieved to set up in suburban, white, middle-class Toronto, where race faded (most of the time) into the background.

When I was growing up, I didnt spend much time thinking about who I was or where I fit in.I was too busy tying my shoelaces, brushing my teeth, learning to spell, swinging baseball bats, and shooting hockey pucks.But once in a while, just as my guard was down, questions of my own identity would leap like a cougar from the woods and take a bite out of my backside.

I have always been fascinated by personal identityhow it is shaped and transformed.Your identity, to a large degree, reflects the society you live in.I imagine myself stranded on a lush tropical island.Until the search party finds me, all I have to do is survive.Im going to build a shelter, eat mangoes, crack coconuts, snare quail and net fish.During this extended time out, Im not going to be thinking very much about the colour of my skin (unless it is getting sunburnt) or my racial identity.These thoughts wont preoccupy me unless tourists invade my paradise and start looking at me, and I start looking at them, and we begin the endless dance of adjusting how we see others, how we want to be seen, and how we see ourselves.