Black Hard Palate

Once upon a time, you had so much pigment in your skin, darkness pooling in your elbows, your knuckles, and especially your knees. You looked, some kid quipped, like you’d fallen on your knees in the blackest dirt on the rainiest day. Mud knees. Shit knees. These kids were black, like you, but they were the right kind, and you, wrong. They’re just kids being kids, your teacher said. But weren’t you just a kid, too?

Sometime later, when you were older but still young, you woke up and noticed a dark splotch on the roof of your mouth, as if a prune had flattened itself against your hard palate. You showed your mother, a nurse who claimed to have seen everything. She’d never seen this before. She took you to your doctor, who said it was just hyperpigmentation, excess pigment that would likely fade along with the darkness on the skin of your joints. Not fade, really. Spread. You’d grow more skin, and the blackness would have someplace to go. How long, you asked, how soon, but all the doctor said is that you would grow out of it. No one would notice, you realized, if you kept your mouth shut, which you mostly did anyway. But one day you let your guard down, guffawed too hard at a joke in front of your friends, mouth agape, and they noticed. What is that? It looks like those pictures in our science book, those pictures of mouth cancer. That’s so freaky, they laughed. You laughed along with them, as you do.

Meanwhile, you were talking, as people do, except wrong. You didn’t talk like you were supposed to where you were born, where you were raised. You didn’t know where your tongue came from, how it learned to do what it did, peeking through your teeth, creating the lisp that makes lisp so hard to say. Wrong accent, wrong words, you didn’t know why you couldn’t sound the way they did, the way you should, though in retrospect the difference might have had something to do with the Africanness of your brand of African American, the foreign family from which you came.

Ghana. There, you’re not Ghanaian enough; here, you’re not black enough, despite how very black you are.

In the future, you will be a woman who cares less about these things, a person who has learned to appreciate her knees, her tongue, her black hard palate. Your worries about the differences that mark you will diffuse, like pigment spreading evenly across skin. But for now, you’re just a kid, waiting to grow.