Oh my sweet child, blaming sister Harlem and your neighbor for your dissatisfaction? With your talk of “mechanical gods” and a “Negro sea” I do believe you’re just trying to convince yourself of everything but the truth.  Your problem isn’t no gilting; it’s that there’s not enough.  No matter the color of your skin and how it mirrors the skin of your friends, you’ll never belong.

Follow their family lines, you can trace all your black neighbors back to the South. Their granddaddies knew the snap of the whip and the cry for freedom. Even after migrating North into those urban jungles, they can feel that universal pull across the Mason Dixon.  Why else do you think I send preachers up to Chicago and Harlem when there’s plenty of ministers in the North? They’re Southerners at heart and long for those primeval drawls and lackadaisical r’s. It’s that history of bondage that unites them to each other and the land.

But you ain’t that. And Helga sure ain’t either. It’s not even just having a White mama.  Even that Hughes type had some white in him. But that blood was distilled in Kentucky. And even then, the rest of him bled out under a whip at some time or other. But you, with your Caribbean father and Danish mother can’t relate to that. Sure, you’re black. But you ain’t no American Black.

Of course, people don’t know that. To them color is color; you look the part so you fill the part. But you know. And it haunts you. It haunts Helga, why she travels around so much searching for a home and family. She needs that ole Grecian lie to make her whole; something to tell her that these are her people, her society.  But until she pulls herself down to Dixieland, it will never be enough. Just gonna keep searching.

 

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