Angela Nissel is the daughter of a white father and a black mother (semihappily married as she says, till they separated), and tells with feeling and humour the adventures her mixed colour has taken her through. The title of her autobiography is, appropriately, Mixed. Her mother blamed herself “for binging kids into the world who don’t know who they are”, while on the other hand she encouraged her small daughter telling her, “Being biracial is the best of both worlds! You’ve got two beautiful races in one package! As you get older, you’ll see the benefits of being from two worlds.”

The first benefit she found out by herself was when Sister Mary ordered at school: “Everyone against the wall in size order!” She lined up with the others, but Sister Mary told her, “Not you, Angela.” She then realised that only white girls had stood up while the black girls had remained in their seats. Why? It was a scalp inspection for lice. Sister Mary explained to her, “All God’s children have their gifts. Black children are blessed. They don’t get head lice.” So she went to seat down back with the black girls. They knew. “Only, I was afraid to remind Sister Mary that my father was white.”

The girls are asked to draw their self-portrait. They are given crayons for colour. The box carried the label: “The Crayola Company supplies 16 Multicultural Crayons to give the child a realistic palette to colour the people of the world.” She is almost white, as her photograph shows, with a slight tinted touch that defies definition. They call it “high yellow”. She draws her face, but lives it uncoloured.

“I raised my hand. ‘I’m done, Sister’, I called out. Sister Mary looked up at me in disbelief, like I was inconveniencing her by finishing so quickly. She slowly walked down my row, loomed silently over my desk for a second, and decreed, ‘Angela, you should colour in your face.’ She was rummaging through her box looking at various tan-hued crayons, and then squinting as she pressed them against my cheek. Giggles erupted from every desk. I felt like telling her she could use the Ash Wednesday leftovers to colour my face. Finally, Sister Mary found a crayon she thought best suited my complexion. ‘Here, Burnt Umber looks to be about right. Colour you face in, and then you’ll be done.’ Sister Mary held out a crayon that looked like it had never been used. In all the years that box existed, no one had ever used Burnt Umber. I flipped my hands so my palms faced the sky. ‘On this side, I’m white!’ I said.”

Her colour creates problems for her during street games. She goes out to play with white children who don’t keep back their curiosity. “Michael, a popular fourth-grade boy, asked me, ‘Are you black of white?’ We were around the corner from my house preparing to pick teams for a kickball game. I knew I should have played with the black kids today, I thought as I glanced longingly down the street at the three black girls jumping rope I wondered if it would be too obvious it I dashed away from the white kids and hopped into their rope. It seemed the kickball game was on hold until I answered Michael, so I gave the response I’d been trained to give, the sentence that was as much a part of my childhood as knowing my phone number and the proper way to sit when wearing a skirt.

‘My mom is black and dad is white’, I said.
‘So you’re a zebra!’ Michael said.

The kickball group gasped and giggled in amazement, like Michael was a comedic genius for calling someone who’s mixed with black and white a zebra. If he were truly witty, he would have called me a panda or a penguin, I thought. ‘Zebra!’ another boy shouted, and the virus spread, infecting two more boys until all took it up. Michelle and Heather, two girls from my class, were laughing at the chant. The five boys, pleased with the bit of attention, decided that playing ring-around-the-zebra was more fun than kickball. ‘I am not a zebra!’ I yelled as they circled around me. Unfortunately, no one could hear my great comeback over five male voices, so I expressed my anger by violently kicking their ball toward the sewer and then turned the other way and sprinted home.

Once inside the door, I tried to tell my parents what had happened but only one sound dropped out of my mouth.’ Zee-zee-zee-eee’, I said to my parents as, trying to hold back my tears and talk at the same time. Finally I spat it out. ‘Z-zebra! Zebra! They called me a zebra!’ As the words flew out, so did my tears. My mother shot my father a look, snatched my by one arm, and smushed my face into her overly powdered chest. I wheezed and cried while my father paced back and for the.

Once the last tear had flowed from my eye to he powdered cleavage, my mother and dad went into the kitchen for a Grown Folks Meeting as they used to do in such cases.

‘I’m going to kill those little sons of bitches’, my father said.
‘And you’ll go to jail!’ countered my mother.
‘They should be in jail!’
‘Where are you going now?’
‘To tell their parents. I won’t hit anybody.’ They came out of the kitchen and my father turned to me, ‘Show me where they live.’
‘I don’t know’, I said.
‘We’ll go to every door until we find them.’

Suddenly, every tear was worth it. We were going door-to-door to kick some racist ass. ‘Wait!’ my mother yelled as we pushed through the screen door. I was afraid she was going to stop our mission, but she wanted only to wipe some of her bosom’s baby powder off my nose. (That’s my mother – how will you get people to stop teasing your daughter if you send her outside looking a mess?). Once she had wiped my face it was ready to go racist-boy-hunting.

My father saw Michelle and asked her where the boys lived. We stomped up the first front steps and rang the bell. A man and a woman cautiously answered the door.

‘Can I help you?’ the man asked.
‘Yes, con can’, my father said. ‘Your son Jimmy called my daughter a zebra.’
‘Oh, God’, Jimmy’s mother said. She turned and shouted, ‘Jimmeee!’ Jimmy came running down the stairs, stopping short of the last step when he saw me and my father.

‘Did you call this girl a zebra?’ Jimmy’s father asked.
‘Yeah, but I wasn’t the only one –’
‘I don’t care who else did it. You apologise to her!’ his father screamed, veins bulging from his neck.
‘I’m sorry’. Jimmy said, more to the carpet than to me.
‘Are you okay with that?’ my father asked me.

Are you okay with that? Is one of the questions you shouldn’t ask kids. Kids don’t understand that some questions aren’t meant to be answered truthfully. I didn’t know I was supposed to say, ‘Yes, I’m okay with that’, and go back home.

‘No’, I said turning to Jimmy’s father. ‘Is he going to get a beating?’ I asked.
‘Please, Angela’, my father reproached me, but by then Jimmy’s mother replied, ‘Yes, he is most certainly getting a beating.’

Jimmy started crying and flew back up the stairs. My father and I went back home feeling proud.”

A touching admission later in life: “I was trying to make up for all the years I wasted hating white people in college.”

(Angela Nissel, Mixed, Villard, New York, 2006, p. 26ss, 177)