Deeply engaged with perfecting my masterpiece, I was curled over with my head down, nose nearly touching the paper, when I felt a tall shadow fall across my quiet corner. I knew instinctively that it was one of the young student teachers looming over me. At four years old I had already begun to develop a keen watch-your-back instinct, so I immediately stopped moving my hand. Tension rose up and stiffened my little body. For a reason I did not yet know, I sensed danger and felt suddenly protective. I held absolutely still until she spoke.
“How ya doin’ there, Mariah? Let’s see.”
Relaxing a bit, I lifted the paper toward her and proudly presented my family picture in progress. Immediately, the student teacher burst into laughter. She was soon joined by another young woman teacher, who also began to laugh. Then a third adult came over to join in the fun. The cheerful buzz of children working with crayons stopped. The whole room had turned to stare at what was happening in my little corner. A brew of self-consciousness and embarrassment boiled up from my feet to my face. The whole class was watching. I managed to speak through the stifling heat in my throat.
“Why are you laughing?” I asked.
Through her giggles, one of them replied, “Oh, Mariah, you used the wrong crayon! You didn’t mean to do that!” She was pointing at where I’d drawn my father.
As they kept laughing, I looked down at the picture of my family I had lovingly and diligently been creating. I’d used the peach crayon for the skin of myself, my mother, my sister, and my brother. I’d used a brown crayon for my father. I knew I was more like the color of animal crackers and my brother and sister were more like Nutter Butters, while my father’s skin tone resembled graham crackers. But they didn’t have any cookie-colored crayons, so I’d had to improvise! They were acting like I’d used a green crayon or something. I was humiliated and confused. What had I done so wrong?
Still cackling hysterically, the teachers insisted, “You used the wrong crayon!” Every time one of them made the declaration the whole gang laughed, laughed, and laughed some more. A debilitating kind of disgrace was pressing down on me, yet I managed to pull myself up slowly, eyes burning and brimming with hot tears.
As calmly as I could, I told the teachers, “No. I didn’t use the wrong crayon.”
Refusing to even give me the dignity of addressing me directly, one of them said to the other snidely, “She doesn’t even know she’s using the wrong crayon!” The laughter and taunting seemed like it would never end. I stood glaring up at them, working very hard not to vomit from embarrassment. But despite my nausea, I did not break my glare.
Eventually the laughter started to subside, and one at a time they backed away from the picture and from me. I watched them across the room, huddled together and whispering. They had only ever seen one member of my family of five: my mother, who dropped me off at school each day. She was the color of the peach crayon. They had no idea and no imagination to suspect that the light toast of my skin, my bigger-than-button nose, and the waves and ringlets in my hair were from my father—my handsome father who was the color of warm maple syrup. His complexion was a crayon color they didn’t have; brown was as close to right as I could get. It was the teachers who had got it all wrong. But despite their cruel and unwarranted attack, they never apologized for the public humiliation, for their ignorance and immaturity, or for demoralizing a four-year-old girl during coloring time.
By the time I made it to first grade, my family of five had crumbled like cookies. My parents divorced, but although they were living a short car ride away from each other, racially their neighborhoods on Long Island were worlds apart.
In first grade, I had a best friend named Becky. She was cute and sweet and looked just like the Strawberry Shortcake cartoon to me. She had big blue eyes, smooth strawberry-blond hair that was naturally sun-kissed and hung perfectly straight down like heavy drapes, and reddish freckles sprinkled across her whipped cream–colored cheeks. In my mind, she looked like what little girls were supposed to look like. She looked like the little girls who were adored and protected; like the little girl my mother might’ve had with a man her mother would’ve approved of.
One Sunday, our mothers made arrangements for Becky and me to have a playdate at my house. I was delighted because Becky and I really had fun together. When Sunday finally arrived, my mother picked up Becky in whatever ragtag car she was driving at the time, and we headed to my father’s house. We pulled up to the brick town house, and Becky and I hopped out of the car. I grabbed her hand and skipped excitedly up the steps. Curiously, my mother hung back and watched—ordinarily she would have driven off. Just as our feet hit the top of the stoop, my six-feet-two-inches-tall, dashing father emerged through the door with a hearty grin. He looked like a movie star.
“Hiya, Mariah!” he called out,
