I imagine myself as a Russian doll. There are several layers beneath the one I present to the world, many thoughts constituting one mind. When I am put together, sitting on a shelf, ready for eyes to see me – I am one face concealing many. I am not the traditional Russian doll, I do not have a straight swath of blonde hair above my pale, rosy cheeks, nor am I wearing flowery garb and a shawl. I am a black Russian doll. My skin is dark, and my cheeks are not rosy. My hair is in its natural afro. I am wearing a regular T-shirt, the closest thing to a shawl that I have is a sweatshirt.
If you were to walk into the doll shop and see me on a shelf with all of the traditional Russian dolls, I would not look like them, I would immediately be other. So, on the outside, I am black, I am outside the norm, and I will be judged as such.
The First Layer, the one just below surface level, would tell you that I like the music propagated as mainstream. The rock of the radio and of white broadcasting stations. This first level watches the same movies as you, she is good friends with you, white reader. She lives in a neighborhood much like yours, with the same types of neighbors and that same sprawling backyard. She grew up on the same television programs, with the same toys. This First Layer talks just like you, with the same lilts and same lingo. She didn’t try to be like you, white reader, but you are all she has known for the entirety of her doll life. Still, there are some key differences that you notice, some things that point to the fact that she is not you, white reader. So you dig deeper.
The Second Layer – she eats Caribbean food. She eats the beef patties and conch fritters from the Bahamas, where Columbus discovered your Americas, white reader. She eats black beans and rice from Cuba where enslaved Africans became black Cubans. Yes, that First Layer can fit in with you, white reader. You might find her misplaced inside one of the traditional Russian dolls. Confused and in need of being put back in the right body. This Second Layer, however, she has got the gap teeth and afro that you cannot deny. Those traits that you, white reader, associate with otherness. Her family looks like the families that you see on TV but not in your neighborhood, like the truths of marginalization that you strive to ignore, white reader.
The Third Layer holds my secrets. The Third Layer did grow up in your neighborhood, did grow up in a nice house, did go to an all-white public elementary school – until she went to a series of slightly more diverse private schools. She didn’t know the history of her own people until shamefully late and didn’t pay much attention to that word, black, for most of her life. She didn’t engage in her culture, didn’t go out of her way to find those that looked like her. She was content, though ignorant.
This Third Layer did not know, however, of the colossal privilege, she had been endowed with. Having two black parents with degrees, living in a majority-white area that was supplied with all of the facilities one might want. She was beautifully and blissfully ignorant to that scourge and pain of racism. She had managed to not notice what it is like to be black in America. The Third Layer lived like this for a good time, but blackness is deeper than skin, it is the fact that racism, that vile sickness, has seized you and struck you down, no matter how privileged or unaware you are.
The Fourth Layer was slightly older than her predecessors. She was a black girl, introduced into black culture, in an environment of black people, was somehow an outsider. And she did not like that. She was aware, then, of how poorly versed in blackness she was and how alienating it was to be the lone black face. The Fourth Layer realized that there was privilege in that nice house she grew up in, that that privilege insulated her from the hardships and pain that her parents endured. Internally, she wonders, ‘would I be closer to my people if I had grown up in the boogie-down, in the hoods where my parents are from?’ She knows that if she had been that person, the kind of doll that has to work twice as hard to get to the shelves with all of the traditionally white Russian dolls, she would not have the same experience, be the same person, go to the same schools. But she cannot help but wonder if there is a trade-off: culture for privilege, community for opportunity?
This black Russian doll, nested behind so many other faces, holds these thoughts inside. Wonders if they are sacrilegious or shared amongst her sisters. She has the same black face as her sisters, but what does that mean? She knows that she will spend the rest of her life wondering who she is and where she fits in. It is ironic, for she fits into her other faces, into herself, so perfectly.
The Fifth Layer is small, still growing. She had been waiting and waiting nervously for racism to find her. To ravenously tear past each layer until it found where she resided and smash her to bits with hate. To ruin her wooden finish, or tarnish her smooth, black skin. She expected a flourish and a grand declaration from racism when it finally revealed itself to her, as she knew it eventually would. For she had learned, from the news and from the tales of every other black doll she knew, that no black dolls were spared from the claws of racism. It was a matter of when and not if. What she did not expect was for calculated, insidious fingers to pry open her other heads until it found her. She did not think that hateful words could penetrate past all of the layers that concealed her. She did not think that racism could be subtle, but that was its greatest trick.
It was then that the Fifth Layer realized that the face she showed to the world was not one that expressed her music taste or the house she grew up in. It expressed just one aspect of her many layers, the one by which others would judge her. There was no lamenting the culture she had not grown up with, there was no questioning the arbitrary metrics of blackness by which she measured herself. Racism still held her in its malicious hands, and when it presented her to others she was simply reduced to a color, a betrayal of her true complexity.
Ranked amongst all of the white ones on the shelves is a black Russian doll. The Fifth Layer of this doll looks just like the Fourth and Third, which look like her twins the Second and First, all of whom match me – the Russian doll. We have the same face, the same heart, different perspectives, and different parts of my life. What you see is my face, the one part of me that has not changed. I am black through and through. And you do not see my soul, my heart, my past, my privilege, my plight. You see a black Russian doll. These dolls are all the same in that most basic respect. Regardless of what they believe or what they have experienced or who they are; they are black, I am black.
I know myself so well that it is strange to me that to the patrons of the store, I am just a color when I am also a soul and face, thoughts and actions. I am the lives I have lived, the forms I have taken on, and yes, I am black.
I like to think that I am a Russian doll, because like those dolls, on the outside I am simply a face, a color, but if you were to look past the surface, there is so much on the inside to be beheld
About the Author:
Adrienne Chacón
Hey friends! I’m Adrienne Chacón (it’s Spanish, not French, but a lot of people wonder) and a New York resident. I’ve been writing stories since I realized I love telling them and before that I was reading. I enjoy movie trivia, comedy, and music. I go to boarding school in New England, I am a part of several student of color affinity group, and I know that empathy can reshape the world! I can be reached at anc2018@outlook.com
The Big Duck 