Call Me Ariel
It's been quite a week to be a princess
I’m doing my makeup in a hotel room outside Nashville in the town of Franklin, Tennessee, before heading to an assembly with local high school students. My bathroom has a magnifying mirror, a luxury I do not have at home, so I turn it on and lean in for a closer glimpse.
I notice a willowy forest of small hairs that have grown comfortable atop my top lip in these years of pandemic when I stopped going for a wax. It’s a bit alarming to see what I cannot normally see. I wonder, is this what people see when they see me? I fish my trusty tweezer out of my dopp kit and pluck the little hairs away. I lean in further to line my eyelids with liquid. I glance at my eyes and do a double-take. This time, I see more than myself.
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When I was little and skinned my knee, Daddy would pull me up into his tall lap, kiss me, and ask with all seriousness how I was going to become Miss America with that scar. I didn’t know then that no Black girl had yet been crowned Miss America, and that no Black girl would be crowned Miss America until 1983. I just knew from Daddy's words that I was beautiful. Perhaps the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen.
Daddy was fifty when I was born, and passed away when I was twenty-seven. When I was young, I paid attention to what was the same about me and Daddy, my Black parent, and what was different.
His skin was a chocolate brown and weathered from age and effort, whereas my skin was a milk chocolate and even a café latte in the winter, and smooth. Half of his neat afro was gray, and the other half stubbornly black, whereas my hair was dark brown, kinky, coiled, and frizzy. His medium brown eyes were a little cloudy and rimmed with a ring of cerulean, a millimeter in width and flecked in gold, whereas my eyes were shiny and so dark brown as to be easily mistaken for black.
Today, I’m as old as Daddy was when I was five, and as I peer at myself in this magnifying glass, I see that my eyes have gone the way of his, a lighter brown, a little less shiny, rimmed with cerulean. I don’t see the gold flecks yet, but I do believe they are coming.
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When I’m traveling, I like the company of TV in my hotel room, and this morning it’s lit with CNN’s coverage of the last long walk the Queen of England will take in her beloved Windsor before being interred next to her husband and monarchs past in the ground.
I take to this story with more than the average American’s attention and concern because I am the daughter of a White British woman, and have always felt a connection to her former country.
Mom was just shy of two-years-old when the Queen we now mourn, then Princess Elizabeth, took to the microphone during World War II as a teenager, and urged all the children of Britain to take cover during the Nazi air raids over the country. Mom's family was poor but someone else in the neighborhood would have had the radio they crowded around for such an important address.
Thanks to a government that believed in lifting people up and out of poverty, Mom's family had health care and a good education. Mom became a teacher of math and science, got a fellowship on a continent far away in Accra, Ghana, where she met and fell in love with a Black American: Daddy.
When Mom brought Daddy home to her small British village in the early 1960s, her parents, my White grandparents, embraced Daddy, a tall dark handsome Black American in an era when it not assumed that one would do so. The only thing different about him in their eyes was his height. At six-two, Daddy was so tall that he had to duck when walking from the front room to the kitchen of the house.
As the Queen’s funeral procession makes its way up to Windsor Castle, the pundits mention that the female members of the Royal Family have chosen to wear jewelry that honors the Queen. Up flashes a photo of the newly-named Princess of Wales, Kate, looking down at two of her children and bearing a pearl choker that belonged to the Queen. Then comes the American, the Duchess of Sussex, Meghan, looking away from the camera in a black hat with eyes bereft, her right ear showing the pearl and diamond earrings that were a gift from the Queen. I take note of Meghan’s caramel skin. I know that when she does not press her hair flat, it, too, is kinky, coiled, and frizzy. That Meghan comes from parents like mine, Black and White. Parents who helped her feel beautiful. Which must help a great deal as she weathers and weathers and weathers the storm of not being what the British people and their press want of a princess, her beloved Harry, son of Diana who loved all people, walking side by side with her holding her hand.
There were racists in Britain back when my parents were newly in love, but my White British family were not among them. There are racists in Britain now. In today's Britain, the press and many in the public cannot see past the color of Meghan's skin. The side-by-side comparisons of Princess Kate praised by the press for doing something and Duchess Meghan being critiqued for doing the exact same thing reveal their prejudice.
What do you think? Can we come to some other conclusion?
Which brings me to the other princess in the news this week, Ariel.
Ariel, the Little Mermaid is fictional, to be clear, but utterly real as a matter of discourse, since Disney's new live-action version of the classic tale casts the Black actress Halle Bailey as the lead. Disney's trailer just went up on YouTube and quickly garnered a whopping 1.5 million dislikes. Which reminds me of the 2012 release of the Hunger Games movie when the character Rue, described in the book as “dark skinned,” was played by Black actress Amandla Stenberg and which garnered similar ire.
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It is said that to those who have always been privileged, equality feels like oppression. This is what’s happening in America. As we are increasingly non-white in population, and as our business, education, publishing, athletics, and entertainment sectors become more integrated, white folks see less (fewer) of themselves out in the world. It looks like some of them also feel less-than. And those feelings lead to fear. And fear is the heart of hatred.
What I love is the love of Black girls and women everywhere, who've been told by Daddies and Moms for generations that no matter what they call us or say about us, Black is Beautiful. What I love is the reactions of little Black girls videotaped in their homes watching the Disney trailer for the first time. Click this link to see a short collection of little girls' eyes lighting with surprise when they realize that the princess looks like them, this time.
Forget the haters. They are in the dusk of their prime.
See the light in these little girls' eyes and try not to cry.
See a child seeing herself represented, finally.
Choose to see that.
Choose to love that.
Eyes like mine.
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