Gray Areas

I never knew my daddy, and when I asked Momma about him, she would always chuckle a little and mumble ruefully around the ever-present hand-rolled cigarette (Bugle tobacco and Zig-Zag papers or a page ripped out of a small Gideon’s Bible when there weren’t any Zig-Zags).

“Shit. Yo’ daddy. He wasn’t much.”

But if I looked at her eyes just then, I could tell he was something else. My Momma loved that man. But it was 1925, and back then black folks and white folks stayed to their own sides of the tracks.

Except on Friday and Saturday nights when the white men—some white men—came out to cut loose. It was the Prohibition, and my Momma sold gin in Ball jars out of her back kitchen window. It wasn’t really gin, just wood alcohol with some juniper berries mashed up in it to give it the right smell. Sometimes, if money was tight, she’d sell something else out of her bedroom. She doesn’t know I know that, but a couple of people told me it was so. I guess that’s how she met my daddy.

Anyway, long story short, my daddy was white, and my Momma is black as night. This man (Mrs. Jefferson next door told me she thought his name was Odum, though she couldn’t tell me if that was his first name or his last name) got so he’d come by every Friday night for a jar of gin. Him and my Momma kind of hit it off, and pretty soon he was a regular bedroom customer, too. After that, my Momma started forgetting to make him pay, and before long, she was flat in love with him. But Mrs. Jefferson said there was never any thought that they might get together open like, because he was white and my Momma was black and that’s all there was to it. And when my Momma got pregnant, well, Mr. Odum stopped coming around at all.

When I was born though, everybody knew who my daddy was, because everybody knew Mr. Odum was the only white man ever got in my Momma’s bedroom. They could tell my daddy was white because I was almost white myself. Back then, they called it “high yellow,” but my skin is more of a shade like coffee with a lot of milk in it.

And don’t you know I grew up not knowing if I was white or black. I was too light for the black folks and too dark for the white folks. I just didn’t fit anywhere. It wasn’t like anyone was mean to me or anything like that. Just that everyone seemed a little suspicious of me, kind of tip-toed around me, like I was a spy or something. It might have been different if we’d lived in New Orleans or someplace like that where everybody is mulatto or octoroon or redbone, but Louisville was a lot more…well it was a lot more conservative, I guess.

That picture that white lady took, well it kind of sums up the way I felt my whole life, right on up to the 1980s when I was too old for it to make any difference any more. Me and my Momma were standing in line waiting for some food because a flood done washed out the Flats, which was the place down next to the river where all the black folks lived in Louisville. Still do, I guess. And this serious-looking little white lady came down there and set up her camera and took that picture. All them happy white people staring out past all us poor black folks, and me and my Momma standing there waiting with the rest of them. You can see me in the picture, because other than the white people on the sign, I’ve got the lightest face in the picture.

I had the lightest face in that whole line, in that whole side of town, except for the lady with the camera and the church folks handing out the food. I wanted to talk to that white woman, see if she knew anybody else like me, see if maybe there was white people that wasn’t quite white, like I wasn’t quite black. I reckon there’s lots of them these days, because a man can marry pretty much who he wants to.

That’s my Momma standing a little bit behind me in the picture, looking like that white man’s dog is going to lean down out of that car and lick her head wet with his big slobbery happy white dog tongue. She was leaning back to tell Mrs. Jefferson what she thought about that food line and that little white woman with the camera. My Momma was telling Mrs. Jefferson what the caption should be for the picture.

“Shit. Look at the po’ black folk waitin’ f’the benevolence of the mighty white man.”

I know she didn’t really feel that way, but my Momma was just like everybody else in that line, worried about where the next meal was coming from and where we were going to sleep until the river went down. Those white people in that billboard knew where they were sleeping, and they knew there was food there for them to eat and clothes for them to wear. That’s why they’re smiling on that billboard, because they’re driving to wherever all that stuff is, and they can see it in the distance getting closer. All us black folks were just headed in the wrong direction. We should have followed those white folks.

But that was 1937. And I reckon since I was a little boy in that line, wearing somebody else’s coat and hat, waiting on a bowl of potato soup and a hunk of bread, we’ve all come closer to whatever it was them white people on that billboard was driving towards and smiling about. I just reckon Mr. Odum got there first.

© 2025 Brian G Parker

Images © Margaret Bourke-White