A Legacy of Colorism
By: Elizabeth Upshur, 2nd Place Adult Poetry Division
I wish my mother was less laissez-faire about color
My identity was a playground insult.
My village was bone white,
no soul sisters, no brothas.
My grown up self fires back,
wraps that hurt up,
labels that incident
under things marked ‘duh’ and ‘of course.’
I am a Transatlantic joke, with the punchline,
388,000 Middle Passage survivors
explode like wild oats in spring
400 years, slave, and Freeman to be my ancestors
counted as chattel in the census
1528, Spain’s Florida, Karankawa, the Chief wet his thumb,
slid it across the African slave Esteban’s cheek
and marveled at his unstained digit.
my maternal ancestor Ghana black,
all slave in Orangeburg, South Carolina,
my paternal ancestor straight up
white in Richmond, Virginia all the way down
to Pennsylvanian paternal grandparents’ paper
bag black, and me, brown skinned in between.
cut to now,
cut to blue vein
Black girls wash out
their color with bleach
like blood of Jehovah
water skin with cocoa
butter and jojoba
No one fucks with dark girls
So lighten up
let the white girls tan.
Growing up in the suburban South,
my sisters and I, we whispered worried
about my father, who had blue
eyes but our kinky hair. My sisters
asked mom is dad Black?
My older sister Kyra held up
her arm for evidence
she said he was a lot lighter
a lot paler than some white people.
He’s black and light, mom
sighed, diced onions for chili.
She never said how black
people got so light.
If you light, you alright.
boys repeat
what was thrown at us
by enslavers in words, whips
with pale-grabbing-holding-down
-taking-who-they-wanted hands.
That is how we got so light. Became one
drop Black but a few drops
white enough to be mistaken
for Latina, light skin pretty girl.
About the Poet: Elizabeth Upshur is an African American Southern poet, translator, and memoirist. Her poetry has been published in regional journals such as Perceptions, Zephyrus, Lost River, and Red Mud Review,and is forthcoming in the anthology Africanization and Americanization. She has workshopped at the Frost Place, been awarded the Katherine Bakeless scholarship to attend the 2017 Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference, and won the 2016 MLK, Jr., Essay Contest. She is a graduate student and freshman composition teacher at Western Kentucky University.