"Why she gotta be light-skinned?"
The question was, I felt, accusatory in nature. I was at a book event in Charlotte, North Carolina in the fall of 2011. I was signing copies of my books
Solstice and The Goddess of Light when an attractive woman walked up to the table. She smiled broadly and placed the two books, one on top of the other, in front of me. I opened the one set on top, pen in hand ready to write some platitude like "Best Wishes!!" or "Good Luck!!--always two exclamation marks--along with my signature (which I've practiced to perfection--an oversized capital letter "D" followed by stylized scribblings with the last letter trailing off with a flourish) when her eyes bored into me. She was a short African-American woman dressed in an HBCU tee-shirt, ripped ever-so fashionably, a long skirt along with a hemp-woven bag. Think a pecan-version of Freddie from A Different World.
"Why she gotta be light-skinned?"
She wanted an answer. And thus I found myself thrust into that irksome quicksand known as colorism. The body politic that is unescapable if you are descended from Africans born in America. The young woman was asking me why the main character of my series of novels, Solstice Maccaffey, was light-skinned. The answer I gave her was that I based Solstice on an amalgam of my beloved female relatives. My mother's drive and ambition, my Aunt Lebbie's style and showwomanship; and her looks based on my aunt Fannie; my father's sister, who was from South Carolina. She was so light that when I was very young I would say "When we goin' to see the
white lady in Rock Hill? I like her." That was only part of it. The other part was that since winning the Miss America Pageant I've had a huge crush on Vanessa Williams and wanted to write a story she could star in when Hollywood came calling to do a film adaptation. Still waiting on that. And 'Nessa if you're reading this you can buy the rights for my series at any time and for a very good price.
"But why she gotta be light-skined though?"
She seemed unsatisfied with my answer. I smiled uncomfortably as the line started to lengthen. Now others, mostly women, peered over her shoulders microscoping me, waiting, all with a "Well...?" expressions on their faces. I felt as if I was being questioned by a Lernaean Hydra, each head ready to swivel into attack at the tiniest hint of me being color-struck. I started to perspire under my clothes. These next few minutes would be crucial. I didn't miss the irony that I, a light-skinned brotha, was about to answer the question of why the main character of my novels was light-skined to a line of brown female readers. And to be honest its a fair question.
Complexion politics has always been with us in America. It doesn't matter that there are light brown indigenous people in West Africa. In American beauty and sexuality, intelligence and approachability, criminality and deviance has all turned on what degree of melanin that resides in our skin. So I looked her square in the eye and said "That's a complicated question."
The reason its complicated is because we live in a society that doesn't value us, Black People, as a group, but also judges us according to our complexion. We talk about it all the time. On social media when one activist calls out some one for marrying a light-skinned woman or when a rapper proclaims if President Obama was really dark he would not have been elected. We hashtag it with TeamLight or TeamDark. We instagram it with eggplants. We are
photoshopped to be lighter (Gaboure Sibde) or we are
photoshopped to be darker (OJ Simpson). We have complexion preferences--"I like my girls thick and chocolate" or "My man is light and sweet like my coffee." We use words like "
interesting" to describe the texture of our hair. We use it passive aggressively "She's pretty for a dark girl." We even
sing about it in Spike Lee movies. This makes Black literature a minefield when it comes to writing about complexion. Some get it right as does
Toni Morrison in The Bluest Eye, some don't as in any number of E. Lynn Harris novels or the legion of writers he spawned who are obsessed with the complexion of their characters. But overall, complexion is something that white writers don't have to worry about. Too a white writer a Black character is Black. Extrapolate at will. But a Black writer must tell the assumed Black reader the exact hue of skin Yancy Harrington Baxter is.
We've all seen the story of the
Tragic Mulatto. I didn't want to write that. I wanted Solstice to be bold. To confront race. But while confronting race we also have to confront it ugly legacies. There are scenes in my books that hold the complexion debate under a microscope that have caused many angry and supportive readers to emails to me. Ultimately Solstice is a series of fantasy novels about a witch living during the Harlem Renaissance. But even in a fantasy world we unfortunately have to drag 400 years of oppression with us. That's not to say race and politics have no place in speculative fiction, just reading
Samuel Delaney,
Octavia Butler,
Nalo Hopkinson, Nnedi Okarafor or Brandon Massey will illuminate that. Rich, powerful stories effused with race, gender and class. I think that's why I chose to make Solstice's best friend so dark. Hooter, that's her names, was the color of ink.
"She looked over at Solstice whose fair skin was considered lavish compared to her matted darkness. Was she less of a person just because she had black skin? Hooter didn’t love her complexion as much as she identified with it. She bathed in its lonely and symbolic depths. She tended to it like a garden. It was the only thing that she could say truly belonged to her."
Through their very different eyes, through the very different treatment they get, we see a world we normally don't see. A world of racism and colorism but also of magic and possibility. A world so surreal that witches exist but one so real that hatred and bigotry do too. A fantasy world where a Black woman, no matter what her complexion, can conquer the world that's the way it should be.
