WHAT GOES UNSAID

Earlier today I was reading the preface to a collection of short stories.  In it, the author describes a day spent shooting hoops with two African-American students.  After impressing them with his skill, the author asked them, “You know who I am?”  They didn’t.  He told them he was Michael Jordan, and they didn’t believe him.

“What makes you think I’m not Michael Jordan?” the author asked.

“Because,” one boy said, “you’re short, old, and fat.”

The author, whose name is Robert Day, writes, “It is what he did not say about my appearance that I like about this story.”

We should know that what is obvious is not always significant.  What some people think is significant is also not obvious to all people.  I was helping in a Sunday school class a few years ago when the teacher showed the kids a picture of a black boy and a white girl standing together.  She asked them how the people in the picture were different.

“He’s a boy and she’s a girl!” was the first answer.  “He’s taller,” was the second.  Finally, after some prompting: “His skin is darker.”  It is how long it took for someone to say it that I like about this story.

I have three sisters-in-law with skin as brown as chocolate.  They were born in Ethiopia, and are the daughters of two very vanilla, American parents.  It is obvious, to some people, that the girls were adopted, but sometimes we forget, especially when one of them says something exactly the way their mom would say it.  I have seen several pictures in which the eldest of them unaccountably resembles my mother-in-law.  They say that looks aren’t everything, but neither is DNA.

“Different” is an acquired taste; we are born without these sensibilities.  I know another family with two sons: one very fair-skinned, the other quite brown.  One day they wore matching shirts and shorts.  “Look at us!” the little one said gleefully.  “We’re twins!”