“You think you are the United Nations?” Tony sneered when Anna claimed ancestors from around the globe. “In America, you are black. Don’t go thinking other people see their relatives in you.” |
E pluribus unum. Out of many, one. America’s boast brazenly embossed on its coins. But in New York a blind man can find his way across the city by his nose, by the odors of food rising from the streets and through open windows. His ears can take him anywhere across the five boroughs. Even when the language spoken is English, he can tell the difference in the accents. He knows he is either uptown or downtown, in African American Harlem or Spanish Harlem, in Caribbean Brooklyn or in East Asian Queens. He knows when he enters the WASP enclave, or the territories carved out by Europeans.
“You think you are the United Nations?” Tony sneered when Anna claimed ancestors from around the globe. “In America, you are black. Don’t go thinking other people see their relatives in you.”
Tony is African American. If other bloods run through his veins, he pretends not to know. His Africanness comes before his Americanness, he said to Anna. And it did not matter when Anna pointed out that except for the two who had been dragged onto slave ships from Africa, he and all his relatives, his parents and grandparents and great-grandparents going back for more than four hundred years, had all been born and raised in America.
Elizabeth Nunez, Anna In-Between, (New York: Akashic Books, 2009), 209.
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