Chameleon Boy from Illinois
You betcha.
You never get a second shot at a first impression. At least that’s what was drilled into me from a young age. “Check yourself” wasn’t told as much as it was modeled. By mom. By dad. By my aunts, uncles, and grandparents. They all obsessed over keeping up with the Joneses. Of if they couldn’t keep up with them, they would try their very hardest to keep up appearances.
To be clear — by “appearances” I mean to appear a WASPy Midwest family with good educations, strong finances, and absolutely no generation familial trauma and turmoil. After all, some of our German & Scandinavian & Irish & Italian-descending neighbors didn’t look too fondly upon a family of 11, all brown as dirt, speaking an unintelligible speech that may as well be Chinese.
My Tía used to correct my grammar. “Don’t speak Ebonics! People will think you’re stupid!” Twelve year old me thought talking Black was fun. Flowy. Lyrical. “Let them think what they think,” I thought. But my worldview was simpler then. I hadn’t been told “no” except by my parents. My white schoolteachers showered me with praise, and always looked a bit confused when they saw my dad and his mile-wide nose at the parent teacher conference. Or when they heard my mom’s thick Eastern European slang on the phone, saying she was on her way to “pickerup my son early today for doctor.”
I knew I was different, but phew — thank god I wasn’t different in the ways my parents were different.
As I grew tall and strong and blew past puberty in a summer and some change, people started treating me in a peculiar way. When they looked at me, their eyes lingered a bit too long, trying to answer the question at the forefront of their minds: what are you?
They had not the courage nor curiosity to find out. Instead their brains took the easy path, and made up stories about me that were more palatable to their small bland minds.
“He’s a Mexican”
“Probably in a gang.”
“He shouldn’t be walking on the same side of the street as me unless he’s up to no good.”
“His hood is up because he’s gonna steal from my store.”
I could see these thoughts flash across their faces. The furrows in their brow would persist. That was, until they heard me talk.
“Oh boy. He talks like us, yah know. Can’t possibly by a gangbanger.”
Little did they know, I was a chameleon.
