Until Then, Joi-Marie

…after my interview with him turned to me and said, “What’s a face like yours doing behind the scenes?”

Superman really is charming.

Thank gawd I brought a change of shoes. My Zara strappy sandles with the gold heel — Chanel knock offs — were starting to hurt. I put on my black Ivanka Trump flats (sensible work shoes, of course) and skipped into a two-story house in far Queens, two blocks over from Long Island. I was met with four drunken Haitians.

“Where is your mother from?” one woman with a Caesar asked.

“D.C.,” I replied pleasantly, because these were old folks. And despite the fact that they were being rude and spoke in Creole for the last 30 minutes while I smiled and laughed when they laughed, it didn’t matter. So I remained pleasant.

“No, but where is she from,” the woman pressed.

“Ummm, D.C. Before that her parents were enslaved,” I said matter of factly. And it was a matter of fact, because I discovered this while doing some digging online. My great-great-grandmother was Martha Elizabeth Howard Murphy, and she was born on September 11, 1846. She died in 1915, two years after my grandmother Ida Murphy Peters was born in 1913. The online digging told me that my great-great-grandmother was born a slave, and was given her bill of sale — dated March 5, 1860 — at the age of 14. Still, she was not freed. As the document said that she was now the property of her mother until age 30. She eventually moved to Baltimore, where she married John Henry Murphy, one of the brothers — the other was Carl — who started the Afro American Newspapers.

Still, I didn’t get into all of that. Because she then switched to my father’s side. I guess breaking the bonds of slavery for a black person in America is no longer a novelty.

“Where is your father from?”

I knew I could impress this Haitian woman with my next ancestral tidbit:

“My father’s parents are from the Bahamas. Two separate islands,” I answered, beaming. This would shut her up!

“Which ones?”

Ummm, hmmm. I couldn’t remember, but said in what must’ve sounded like broken English, “Eleuthera.” I couldn’t remember whether my grandmother was from there or if it was my grandfather. And I hoped she wouldn’t ask.

Another Haitian man, more politely but not really, corrected me. “You mean Eleuthera,” he said the correct way.

“Yes!” I laughed it off, because that’s what you do. And while mid-laugh, mid-relief, I had hoped this line of questioning would stop because I had just realized that being black — JUST BLACK — in America was no longer good enough…IN AMERICA. Then the first Haitian woman said. “Oh. You’re a fake Bahamian.”

And at that point — with the spirit of my grandmother Ida, who really took shit from no one — I got up and left.